In which situations may a State lawfully use force against another State? Is it possible that the law may change over time, so that what would previously be considered an unlawful use of force will come to be seen as lawful?

These questions were at the centre of the debate about the legality of the airstrikes against the Assad government in Syria, carried out by the US, UK and France on 13 April 2018.[1] Yet they also go to the heart of the modern jus ad bellum, the rules of international law that govern the use of force by States in their international relations. My research looks at how the law in this area is structured and aims to identify the processes by which the jus ad bellum can change.

International law, as a decentralised system of States, has no central legislative body that enacts binding laws for the international community. States become subject to international legal obligations primarily by entering into treaties and through the emergence of rules of customary law as a result of the practice of States.

The adoption of the United Nations Charter in 1945 brought about a paradigm shift in how international law regulated war. From a sovereign right and a legitimate policy choice, albeit subject to increasing restriction over the first half of the twentieth century, the use of force by States became subject to a comprehensive prohibition, set out in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter.[2] There are only two narrow exceptions to this prohibition, when force may lawfully be used: collective measures authorised by the Security Council under Chapter VII of the Charter, and the right of States to use necessary and proportionate force unilaterally in self-defence, if an armed attack occurs.

In addition to this treaty law rule in Article 2(4) which binds all UN member States, the prohibition on force also developed into a parallel rule of customary international law, binding on all States.[3] It is also widely accepted that the prohibition on the use of force has the status of a “jus cogens” norm of international law, from which no derogation is permitted. Although the existence, definition and content of this category of international legal rules remains contested, typically jus cogens norms protect the fundamental values of the international community and include, for example the prohibitions on genocide and torture.

Thus, the prohibition on the use of force is expressed in three forms: the treaty provision in Article 2(4) of the Charter, a parallel rule of customary international law, and a jus cogens norm. To draw an imperfect analogy with domestic law, imagine the same prohibition of murder existing in a criminal statute, as a common law rule developed by the courts, and as a provision in the Constitution.

This account is necessarily a simplified one that skips over the many debates surrounding the definition of force, self-defence, and the functioning of the collective security system that have arisen since the Charter’s adoption, and some of which remain unresolved. However, fundamentally, this is the international legal framework that regulates the use of force by States today: a comprehensive prohibition on the use of force, with two narrow exceptions.

It is against this backdrop that the UK government’s claimed legal basis for the airstrikes on 13 April 2018 must be assessed. In a legal position published on 14 April, the UK government asserted that “the UK is permitted under international law, on an exceptional basis, to take measures in order to alleviate overwhelming humanitarian suffering.”[4] This is almost certainly not correct under international law as it stands – as noted above, there are only two exceptions to the prohibition on the use of force, neither of which applies in this case. The UK position is inconsistent with the text of the Charter and very few States take the view that a legal right of humanitarian intervention currently exists, while many more have explicitly stated that they do not recognise the existence of any such doctrine.

Indeed, for the UK position to be correct, it would need to be shown that the legal framework set out above had evolved since 1945 so that a new legal basis for the unilateral use of force by states had come into existence. This could be, for example, through a change to the prohibition so that it no longer banned force used for humanitarian purposes, or creation of a third exception of humanitarian intervention. However, given the complex structure of the law in this area, any argument that the jus ad bellum has changed faces a number of obstacles.[5]

First, as described above, the prohibition on the use of force exists in multiple legal rules. Therefore, even if a State could show that a new customary international law rule permitting humanitarian intervention had come into existence, any State claiming to rely on that right would still be in violation of its treaty obligation as a UN member not to breach the prohibition on the use of force in Article 2(4) of the Charter. This situation is further complicated by Article 103 of the UN Charter, which provides that the obligations of UN members under the Charter take precedence over their other obligations. Any State wishing to rely on a right of humanitarian intervention would therefore need to show not only that a new rule of customary law had emerged – which requires widespread and consistent practice by States accompanied by their belief that such a legal rule exists – but also that the UN Charter had been reinterpreted to allow for humanitarian intervention. Demonstrating such a reinterpretation, although possible in principle, is a difficult standard to meet: practice would need to establish the agreement of all UN members that the Charter should now be interpreted in this way.[6]

A second, more difficult, obstacle is presented by the jus cogens status of the prohibition on the use of force. Jus cogens norms can only be modified by another norm of the same character, so it seems that any new legal basis permitting humanitarian intervention would also need to show that it had fulfilled the test for emergence of a new jus cogens norm: acceptance and recognition by the “international community as a whole” that the norm has such a status.[7] This threshold is lower than that required to demonstrate reinterpretation of the UN Charter through subsequent practice, described above, but there are other characteristics of jus cogens norms that may complicate the process of change. Jus cogens norms invalidate contrary practice, depriving it of any legal effect it may have to bring about an evolution in customary law.[8] The presence of the jus cogens norm therefore seems to put those arguing for a change to the prohibition of the use of force in an all-or-nothing position: either they show that the stringent requirements for changing a jus cogens norm have been met, or any practice short of that threshold will not only be in violation of the jus cogens prohibition, but also ineffective to bring about a change in the customary or treaty norms.

In sum, the existence of multiple legal rules prohibiting the use of force, and the characteristics of the Charter and the jus cogens norm that cause them to prevail over conflicting rules, mean that changing the prohibition on the use of force appears to be very difficult indeed. The UK legal position does not explain whether the purported new right of humanitarian intervention on which it relies is understood as a new rule of custom, a reinterpretation of the Charter, or a new jus cogens norm. As shown above, it appears that a plausible claim may need to demonstrate that it is all three, simultaneously.

There are good reasons why it should be difficult to change the prohibition on the use of force. Conceptual and methodological arguments about legal rules gloss over the death, suffering and displacement that is caused by armed conflict; historically, the impact on women has been particularly overlooked.[9] The drafters of the Charter wanted to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”[10] by creating a new international legal order where unilateral use of force by individual States became the rare exception and not the rule. Even if the prohibition on the use of force is not universally complied with (what law is?), the current legal framework requires States to justify any use of force in terms of its requirements or face international condemnation, which in itself has a restraining effect. Creating a new legal basis for States to use force – without collective authorisation – would upset the current balance, tilting it in favour of greater unilateralism. In addition, in the specific context of humanitarian intervention, any increased permissiveness is unlikely to benefit all States equally. States that already enjoy greater military and political power will be more able to take advantage of a new right to use force unilaterally. Less powerful States, on the other hand, will see their protection from foreign intervention diminished.[11]

Nevertheless, the arguments remain finely balanced. While a legal right of humanitarian intervention does not exist in international law today, with the Security Council sliding back into gridlock and unable to address threats to peace and humanitarian disasters, international consensus may well shift to accept that intervention without Security Council authorisation is permissible in some circumstances. In such a case, it may be preferable for the international legal framework to be able to evolve to accommodate a new legal basis for the use of force, either within or in addition to the existing exceptions, rather than risk the prohibition being repeatedly violated or ignored, as appears to have been the case with the US, UK and French strikes last month. Developments such as the provision in the Constitutive Act of the African Union for a collective, regional, treaty-based right of humanitarian intervention could provide a less disruptive alternative to increased unilateral uses of force.[12] Yet, as the law stands, this provision appears to be unlawful.

Clarifying the processes by which the rules of the jus ad bellum can change could help provide a shared basis for States and international lawyers to evaluate claims that the rules governing the law on the use of force have changed, and avoid a more unstable situation where States instead abandon or undermine the authority of the prohibition on the use of force or the Charter system. It is this question, of how the prohibition on the use of force and its exceptions can change, that my research will address.

[3] As later confirmed by the International Court of Justice, Militarv and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America). Merits, Judgment, I.C.J. Reports 1986, p. 14, at para. 190.

[8] Orakhelashvili, Changing Jus Cogens Through State Practice? The Case of the Prohibition of the Use of Force and its Exceptions, in Weller (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Use of Force in International Law (OUP 2015).

[9] Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, Shelley Wright, Feminist Approaches to International Law, 85 American Journal of International Law, 613, 645 (1991); Christine Chinkin, A Gendered Perspective to the International Use of Force, 12 Australian Yearbook of International Law 279, 293 (1988-1989).

Former Irish President Mary Robinson (left) and Ethiopia’s Hiroute Guebre Sellasie, the UN’s only female lead mediators

In his December 2016 inauguration speech, the newly elected Secretary General of the United Nations (UN), former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Guetterres, indicated that one of the priorities of his term in office would be conflict prevention. He emphasised the need to take more creative approaches to prevent the escalation of conflict, including notably a much stronger emphasis on the use of mediation and creative diplomacy. Prevention, it is said, is better than cure, particularly when conflicts such as Syria, Yemen, South Sudan and Israel/Palestine are proving so difficult to ‘cure’. The emphasis on mediation marks the culmination of a longer process of review within the UN of the ways it responds to violent conflict. A series of reports evaluating the UN’s peacebuilding architecture led to the 2016 adoption of the ‘Sustaining Peace Agenda’, marking a commitment to increased coherence across the organisation in co-ordinating peacebuilding activities.[1] Resolution 2282 (2016) emphasises ‘the importance of a comprehensive approach to sustaining peace, particularly through the prevention of conflict and addressing its root causes, […] and promoting […] inclusive dialogue and mediation…’

This priority is also accompanied by a commitment by the new Secretary General to address a persistent problem within the UN – the need to ensure gender parity.

Resolution 2282 reaffirms the importance of women’s participation in peace and security, as well as stressing the importance of increasing women’s leadership and decision-making in relation to conflict prevention. The bringing together of these two priorities, namely an increased role for mediation in international peace and security and a commitment to increasing the participation of women in leadership roles within the UN, presents a good opportunity to consider the role of women in conflict mediation.

Of course, a commitment to increasing women’s participation in conflict prevention and peacebuilding is not new. Since the Security Council passed its landmark Resolution 1325 in 2000, the role of women in conflict resolution and peacebuilding has been on the Security Council agenda. The ‘Women, Peace and Security Agenda’ has consistently highlighted the underrepresentation of women in peacebuilding and a number of strategies have been implemented to try and redress this imbalance. There is a very significant body of work on the reasons that women should be included in peacebuilding. This work has highlighted the benefits of including women and has highlighted the different roles that women play within peacebuilding,[2] however it has largely overlooked the specific category of women in the role of mediator. This is despite clear policy commitments throughout the WPS resolutions that call for greater representation of women within high-level UN mediation teams.[3] And yet, despite over 10 years work on the WPS agenda, the number of women actively included in peace talks as mediators remains persistently low. Research shows that, of 31 UN-led mediation processes between 1991 and 2011, only 3 were led by women as the chief mediator. This translates into only 2.7 % of all chief mediators.[4] As a result in 2013 the Security Council passed resolution 2122 further requesting the Secretary General to support the appointments of women at senior levels as UN mediators and within the composition of UN mediation teams. By 2014 the UN had appointed two female lead mediators – the former Irish president Mary Robinson, and Hiroute Guebre Sellasie of Ethiopia – and women held a further 14% of senior UN mediation positions.[5] However this figure remains low in light of the Secretary General’s 2010 commitment to increasing the number of women appointed to lead UN peace processes.[6]

The very low statistics of women in the role of chief UN mediator creates an impression that women are simply not engaged in the mediation of violent conflict. Yet, in practice, we know this is not true.

In conflicted states across the globe women are actively involved in the mediation of violent conflict. The roles they play are increasingly being recognised through the creation of networks of women mediators such as those created by Nordic States, by African States, and in support of the peace process in Colombia. So why, when women are so active in mediation at the local level, do we not see more women in high level UN led processes? My research suggests a number of reasons for this apparent contradiction.

Responsibility for increasing the participation of women in mediation is divided across different departments within the UN. The appointment of high-level envoys or Special Representatives of the Secretary General – those we all recognise as the public face of UN-led mediation – lies with the Department of Political Affairs. The appointment of a mediator in this context refers specifically to the appointment of an individual by the Secretary General to pursue conflict diplomacy on his behalf. These are high-level political appointments and are almost exclusively at the discretion of the Secretary General himself. The Envoy will be the person responsible for convening the Track I – or state-level- talks. Women are very under-represented in these positions.

This focus on high-level talks and on the leadership role of international mediators can be contrasted with the approach taken by UN Women, the body tasked with working with member states to further the empowerment of women and support peacebuilding capacity within the State. At this level, mediation happens at a local level, within and between communities. It is at this level that women mediators are most strongly represented.[7] Women are regarded as bringing significant skills to mediation not only while official Track I processes are happening, but before and after those processes, in some cases enabling the process to take place. Through their roles as intermediaries women can create the conditions whereby talks are possible, for example by negotiating the cessation of hostilities to allow humanitarian access or opening channels for dialogue.[8]

The division of responsibility between the DPA and UN Women, both of which have very different operational mandates, creates a potential gap between mediation in local or national contexts and mediation that occurs at the international level. While women may demonstrate strong mediation skills and have considerable experience of mediating disputes, this experience does not result in inclusion in international mediation teams. There is a point at which women mediators tend to drop out of peace talks, and this is the point at which international actors become involved. At this stage, women are not considered to be ‘political’ enough to want to play a role in high-level mediation.

In these circumstances, women’s local experience is often overlooked in favour of bringing in international experts (who may also be women) to consult on the design and delivery of mediation processes. This means that not only do local women become marginalised in the process, but their insight into the conflict dynamics is also lost.

When women return to the process they return in the role of participants in the process—as a vulnerable group to be consulted rather than as the agents of change they have been. Further, the extent of women’s participation is also largely dependent on how willing the mediator is to include them,[9] leaving women inherently vulnerable to exclusion.

Of course not all women who engage in mediation at the community level will seek international opportunities. Similarly, there may be local gender dynamics that make it difficult for local women to step into political positions. But it is patronising to suggest that all women mediators are satisfied with working at the local level. Many have the skill, the experience and the ambition to play greater roles internationally. What is missing is a route to integrate them into formal processes.[10] While the role of Envoy will always be available only to a very small category of people, there is no reason that women should not play more prominent roles within high-level mediation teams.

There may be a very practical reason for the failure of women mediators to make the transition from local or national experience to international experience. It may simply be, for example, that they are not coming to the attention of the DPA at the time at which mediation teams are being selected. Member States therefore have a role to play in the career development and the nomination of women for inclusion within UN teams. If the DPA relies on nominations from Member States for identifying suitable candidates, then States can potentially support the work of both UN Women and the DPA by bridging the gap between the local and the global. This would include identifying women working as mediators within the community sector, the private sector as well as the Women’s sector, thereby casting the net much wider than traditional approaches. It would involve recognising the contribution that women mediators are already making to conflict resolution.

Taking a proactive approach to identifying women mediators, and ensuring that they benefit from the necessary career development opportunities at the national level, would be a big step towards a more coherent approach to ensuring that women’s contribution to mediation is made visible internationally.

Taking such an approach is consistent with the Sustaining Peace Agenda and speaks directly to the need for greater synergy between the relevant agencies responsible for sustaining peace and promoting gender parity.

Allegations of peacekeepers committing sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) are not new. They arose in the missions of the 1990s, such as the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) and missions in the former Yugoslavia. Use of prostitutes and sexual exploitation of women by visiting military forces goes even further back- a tradition with a long history.

The background, the numbers

The UN has spent over a decade trying to stamp out SEA by its peacekeepers; starting with a bulletin issued by the Secretary-General in 2003, setting the UN’s ‘zero tolerance policy’ on SEA. The statistics show that its actions were, in part, succeeding. While they had not managed to eliminate the criminal conduct, allegations dropped significantly. In 2005-6, allegations peaked at 357 and 340. By 2014, allegations hit an all-time high at 51. Yet in 2015, a new scandal hit, and allegations rose again for the first time since 2009, with 69 allegations. In addition, non-UN French peacekeepers were accused of SEA, and the UN was found to have behaved with gross negligence in failing to act on the information they had about these allegations. In 2016, the Security Council passed its first ever resolution on peacekeepers and SEA (Res 2272). The US Representative to the UN, Samantha Power, said it was the first time she really felt like the only woman representative on the Security Council.

What is SEA?

SEA by peacekeepers covers a wide range of activities, from rape and sexual abuse to human trafficking, enforced prostitution, pornography, sexual slavery and sexual exploitation. Victims are women and children (of both genders). Sexual exploitation is a very particular crime; it involves the abuse of the peacekeeper’s position of power and the trust of the victim in order to force sexual activity in exchange for money or goods. It is important to recognise the abuse of power element, because peacekeepers are tasked with protecting civilians, and their abuse of trust is particularly significant. Examples include the exchange of ration packs for oral sex from boys, or the exchange of a hairclip or food as little as an egg for oral sex from girls. There have also been issues of paternity claims due to children born to women engaged in consensual and non-consensual sexual activity with peacekeepers.

What’s being done about it

The UN established a Conduct and Discipline Unit (CDU), tasked with receiving reports of misconduct and carrying out preliminary investigations. Allegations with merit are referred on to the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), which then conducts further investigations. However, despite the necessity and good work of these offices, the CDU and OIOS are offices of the UN that can do no more than have a peacekeeper repatriated to their home country. Repatriation is the most serious repercussion for peacekeepers who commit misconduct, including criminal conduct such as SEA. In addition, I have been reliably informed by a UN employee that the UN is too much of a ‘boys’ club’ for SEA to ever really be stamped out- that the will simply is not there to take firm action.

A constant refrain heard is that it is the sending states’ responsibility to punish their own personnel. UN reports refer to the fact that sending states have exclusive jurisdiction over their personnel, and therefore it is up to sending states to punish their personnel. There the discussion ends. Not one report or assessment has considered whether states are actually capable of punishing their own peacekeepers for SEA crimes.

Examining the reality of the repercussions: A case study of Australia & The US

I have undertaken a comparative analysis of the laws of Australia and the United States, in order to determine whether or not these two states have the ability to prosecute their peacekeepers for SEA. The overall finding is: yes, but far from comprehensively. Australia has a much better capability than the United States, although amendments made to the US Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) in 2013 have improved the USA’s capacity.

Australian law applicable to the Australian Defence Force (ADF) is actually quite comprehensive with regards to sexual offences. Prohibited conduct under various pieces of legislation includes sexual assault, rape, rape of a minor, act of indecency with a minor, child pornography, sexual servitude, child prostitution, forced prostitution, trafficking, slavery, and sexual offences against children (tourism) outside Australia. However, there is no blanket prohibition on prostitution (which is of specific issue in conflict and post-conflict situations), and no proscription of sexual exploitation.

The UCMJ prohibits United States Armed Forces (USAF) personnel from committing patronising a prostitute, pandering, child endangerment, child pornography, rape, sexual assault, child rape, child sexual assault/abuse, forcible pandering, and anal rape. USAF personnel are also subject to the US Code, which outlaws sexual abuse, sexual exploitation of children, child sexual abuse, sex trafficking of children, forced and fraudulent sex trafficking and transportation for illegal sexual activity. These laws lack prohibition of forced prostitution, sexual exploitation of adults, and sexual slavery. While a discussion of this is out of the scope of this article, there are also definitional issues including those of sexual exploitation of children and rape.

The issue of extra-territorial jurisdiction

However, not only is it an issue of whether these countries have provisions in their criminal law that outlaw the SEA being carried out by peacekeepers, but whether these countries are permitted to prosecute their personnel for crimes committed outside their own territory. This is termed ‘extra-territorial jurisdiction’. In this regard, Australia comprehensively ensures that all legislation applying to the Australian Defence Force (ADF) is applicable extra-territorially. This includes civilians accompanying the ADF.

In terms of the United States Armed Forces (USAF), the situation is murky. Crimes under the US Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) that attract a punishment of greater than one year imprisonment are granted extra-territorial jurisdiction under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, including for crimes committed by civilians and contractors accompanying the USAF or employed by the Department of Defence or any other federal agency. However, this limitation of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act only to crimes with more than one year of punishment excludes extra-territorial jurisdiction over prostitution-related offences, which attract a maximum penalty of only 12 months prison. In addition, the majority of relevant offences under the US Code are not applicable outside the United States, with extra-territorial jurisdiction granted only to crimes involving sex trafficking, labour trafficking, forced labour, slavery and torture. This means that the USA is unable to prosecute its peacekeepers for sexual abuse, sexual abuse of children, sexual exploitation of children and transportation for illegal sexual activity.

The need for reform is urgent

Australia and the USA are countries that pride themselves in setting an example in being at the forefront of criminal law reforms, and they are indeed far ahead of many other countries with regards to proscribing sexual offences. However, it is evident that even these two countries are not fully capable of prosecuting their peacekeepers for SEA crimes. Where does this leave us, then, with regards to countries that are major troop contributing states, such as Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, where sexual offences are not taken seriously at a domestic level and legislative provisions are seriously lacking?

If the UN is ever going to seriously eliminate SEA by peacekeepers, then the new UN high-level task force on SEA needs to work with states to amend domestic laws in order to ensure that after repatriation, assuming the will to punish is there, so is the ability. Otherwise, peacekeeper perpetrators will continue to simply be repatriated with impunity, and these serious SEA crimes will endure.

Gender and terror – woman first, fighter second?

As acts of political violence flood local and international news media outlets, it is imperative that academic study scrutinises, and if necessary, challenges, these news media representations. For the majority of people watching, listening to, or reading the news, these representations are the only information that they will receive. Hence, the content of these portrayals and how they are produced, have a significant impact on news consumers’ ideologies and understandings of political violence.

What is more, violence (and most threats to security) are deemed a primarily male domain. Women’s involvement in political violence jars with this ‘masculine endeavour. Women who commit acts of political violence are not depicted simply as combatants, freedom fighters or terrorists, but their representations in the news media are gendered. The terms female combatant/freedom fighter/terrorist are pregnant with gendering, as not only does the adjective ‘female’ come before combatant/freedom fighter/terrorist, which highlights her gender before her actions, but the fact that her gender must be qualified speaks volumes about the palatability of women engaging in political violence.

As the news media have a significant role in mirroring, creating and perpetuating social norms, the consequences of this is that the categories of representation can be adopted by news consumers and repeated and reiterated through dialogue and socialisation. The news media may be guilty of underpinning, rather than confronting, the dominant patriarchal culture and subsequently participating in women’s marginalisation in public life.

In society, women are generally defined by traditional gender roles, and these narratives are picked up by the news media and bolstered by repeated depiction. In the news media, women are still depicted using a formula of gendered accounts, especially with a focus on appearance. For example, hits in Google for Amal Clooney are blogs dedicated to her fashion sense. Unfortunately, her impeccable style looms large over her career as a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers. Moreover, Michelle Obama is as well-known for her clothes (Weaver, 2017) as she is for her campaign for female education. Although there is nothing fundamentally wrong with referring to someone’s clothes, when this becomes the be all and end all of a person’s characterisation this is where it is detrimental to women’s equality. If women’s news media portrayal is distilled down to an outfit, this constrains women’s roles to one-dimensional symbols of beauty rather than as figures of change.

This is particularly notable with regards to female combatants, as their acts of political violence are also framed by gender constructions. For example, the online New York Post’s headline ‘She’s Beautiful and She’s an Alleged ISIS Terrorist’ (Rosenbaum, 2015) gives the impression of puzzlement. Why would a beautiful woman choose to be a terrorist as surely her beauty could have been better spent elsewhere?! The currency (and commodity) of beauty is a valuable and looked-for bargaining chip in society, “[t]hey call her the ‘beautiful terrorist with a Mona Lisa smile’ and she’s as wanted as any work by Leonardo da Vinci”(Rosenbaum, 2015). The choice of the word “wanted” alludes to her being sought by authorities for terrorist offences, but also wanted as in desired sexually. The portrayal of her appearance and associated sexuality have overshadowed her political activism, and the fact that the allusion to her looks precedes her occupation underscores the notion that her appearance is more important than her political agency.

Furthermore, the interview of Viner (2001) and Leila Khaled of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is saturated with gendered connotations: “international pin-up”; “the gun held in fragile hands, the shiny hair wrapped in a keffiah, the delicate Audrey Hepburn face refusing to meet your eye”; “Her cheekbones are still like knives; her eyes are gentle but flicker when moved”. This effusively gendered account of Khaled champions her appearance over her acts of political violence in 1960s and 70s. The oxymoron of the ‘beautiful terrorist’ suggests an uneasiness as beauty and terror are conflated. The paradoxes of sharp cheekbones as signifiers of attractiveness and knives as deadly weapons, and of delicate hands holding lethal arms, are difficult to reconcile. On the one hand, the female combatant is aesthetically pleasing by adhering to the accepted norms of beauty, however, on the other hand, her beauty is balanced with the ugly acts of terrorists. It is challenging to negotiate and navigate between the two notions in the news media. Therefore, in order to acquaint the female terrorist with the news consumer, familiar frameworks of understanding are utilised.

One such framework is the theme of hypersexuality. The Independent.ie calls Idoia Lopez Riano “the seductress ‘Tigresa’ lost her lust for killing” (Govan, 2011a) that alludes to her sexuality and female libidinousness which portrays her as a lascivious profligate. Frequently, female sexuality is referenced to undermine a woman’s credibility and ability. Moreover, an ‘oversexed’ woman is portrayed as having aberrant sexuality which has led her to murder, rather than a conscious and deliberate choice based on political acumen. The “green-eyed femme fatale”(Govan, 2011b) is a seductress rather than a political activist.

Another theme used to characterise female combatants is that of motherhood imagery. Kendall (2015) reports that Mairead Farrell, a member of the Provisional IRA, endeavoured to distance the female volunteers from the Mother Ireland image “because it didn’t reflect what we believed in…we’d moved on from that”. The iconic maternal figure wholly undercuts any form of agency within female combatants by reducing them to flat characters with meaning imbued upon them, rather than revolutionaries with their own agency.

The themes used in the news media categorise the female combatants/terrorists/freedom fighters in such a way as to undermine any form of agency or choice. The female combatant is difficult to articulate to a mass audience, thus short-hand stereotypes paint her with broad brush strokes and whitewash her political activism to present a less threatening woman, rather than a violent agent of change. A significant outcome of preserving the image of traditional feminine passivity in the news media, is that the imagery is internalised by news consumers and this affects how female combatants are seen. By manipulating gendered cultural norms to advance their cause, women have a vital role in paramilitary organisations where certain activities cannot be performed by men without attracting unwanted attention and detection. However, this further exemplifies and solidifies women’s secondary role in society by fostering gender inequality. Women’s emancipation is truncated because social values, expectations and assumptions about women are preserved.

Women are underestimated because of their presumed non-threatening nature; they are not important enough to warrant investigation. Due to this, women can infiltrate areas without detection or suspicion. In addition, the sensitivities to searching women’s bodies allow women to feign pregnancy in order to hide bombs (Bloom et al., 2011).

Therefore, when the news media keeps these gendered narratives alive it is misinforming the population about female combatants’ capabilities. Perhaps this is over-reading and over-stating the news media’s role – however, as news media accounts of female combatants (and women in general) still present them as sex objects, these representations must be analysed and confronted. It is important to examine gender as a category of experience and a social process, but it must not be overemphasised as a reason for actions. When political violence is reduced to gendered reasons, such as the Chechen Black Widows (Stack, 2011), this only allows the female actors to be understood through the prism of gender, which is a social construction. This is internalised in social cognition and can have devastating effects upon women’s equality, as it fosters the male as the norm and female as the other.

Not only do gender stereotypes in the news media harm gender equality, they also impede counter- and anti-terrorism security measures. Nacos’s advice is that in order to combat terrorism, the opportunities for the manipulation of gender prejudices by terrorists must be shut down. A suggested method is to allow and encourage gender reality to inform counter-terrorism policies by removing the gender stereotypes of female combatants in the news media, as these stereotypes “reflect and reinforce deep-seated societal attitudes”(2005: 448).

To finish, this analysis of the news media endeavours to be critical rather than pessimistic as the news media also have the power to defy pre-existing norms by refusing to use familiar gender stereotypes to represent female combatants and women in general.

Much has been written lately about African child soldiers.[1] We, in the West, are all familiar with the image of an eight or ten year old boy, holding an AK-47 too big for him, in a pseudo-military uniform, his eyes crying for help. We see him in newspapers and on television. We hear his horrifying story in documentaries, interviews, and sometimes self-written memoirs. Since Blood Diamond[2], we also see him in fiction films, poignant and stereotypical representations of these kids’ tragic lives that we too readily take for granted. And, as Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wonderfully puts it in an inspiring TedTalk, “the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make the single story become the only story”.[3]

The ‘typical’ child soldier

But where are the girls in all of that? Why don’t we see pictures of little girls carrying AK-47s? Why is there virtually no girl – not a single one – in Netflix’s critically acclaimed Beasts of No Nation[4], while many studies have proven that they constitute up to 40% of all child soldiers in some African contexts? Why are they so often completely ignored by academic literature, governments, international organisations and NGOs alike?

The answer should not come as a surprise. Once again, the Patriarchy strikes: society puts us in two clear-cut categories, where according to our biological sex – male or female[5] – we are expected to behave in a certain way. Girls will naturally be peaceful, pacifist, and passive; boys will be inherently violent, aggressive, and impulsive. Hence the common belief that on one side, ‘girls don’t fight’, while on the other, ‘boys will be boys’ – which inevitably leads to the idea that war is the realm of men, and of men uniquely.

No wonder, then, thatgirl child soldiers are invisible, even when confronted with evidence that 10 to 30% of child soldiers worldwide are female, and 30 to 40% in recent African conflicts.[6]

When – and if – mentioned, it is only as simple camp followers. As the ‘good little women’ they are, they cook, do the laundry and take care of the youngest. But in reality, many receive military training and fight just like the boys.[7] During the Mozambican War of Independence (1964-74), which opposed the Portuguese government and FREMILO (The Mozambique Liberation Front), the rebels had mixed and female-only military units where girls and young women fought for the liberation of their country.[8] War was an opportunity for them to escape their gender roles. They were treated just the same as men. But once the country became independent in 1975, it was not long before they were sent back to the kitchen, and the crucial role they played was progressively forgotten.

Johnny Mad Dog or the stereotypical child soldier narrative

We should not underestimate the power of the media and of pop-culture. They both represent and influence the way we make sense of the world. The first thing I did when I started researching child soldiering in Africa (for my master’s dissertation) was to try to find as many fiction films and documentaries on the topic I could. Before entering the more nuanced and detailed academic discussion, I wanted to have the exact same perception of the phenomenon as everyone else.

I was shocked when I watched Johnny Mad Dog[9], the ultraviolent and ultra-clichéd adaptation of the eponymous novel by Emmanuel Dongala[10]. It tells Johnny’s story, abducted at 9 by rebels, now 15, in yet another unnamed African country torn by a senseless conflict – the Western discourse on African child soldiers is also profoundly racist: most movies are entirely decontextualized, as if the story could take place anywhere on the continent, negating the vast diversity of its 54 countries and the complex reasons that lead to armed conflict.

In the book, there are two narrators: Johnny and Laokolé, a strong and smart girl, who manages her way through a world of violence and chaos. But Sauvaire completely silences her to put Johnny at the centre of the story. She becomes a character of secondary importance. Even worse: while in the book she cold-bloodedly plans to kill Johnny, and does it, as she knows he intends to rape and kill her, the film ends on her indecision whether to shoot at him in self-defence. Her originally strong agency is simply erased.

Dongala’s resistant discourse is violated and distorted to conform to the expectations of a public for which violence is the monopoly of males.

If you are active on social media, there is a good chance that you have heard of the Kony2012[12] phenomenon. The 30-minute video posted on YouTube by Invisible Children, an NGO built by three American missionaries, was created with the aim of fighting the child-soldiering the three “discovered” in Uganda. The viral video – which gained 100 million views in less than a week – sums up pretty well all the stereotypes on child combatants. It also illustrates the difference of treatment between girls and boys in the global discourse: “the girls are turned into sex slaves, and the boys into child soldiers”. Things are simple. Girls do all the chores and are sex slaves. Boys are forced to fight and to commit atrocities. Girls don’t fight and boys don’t get raped. Even more than their male counterparts, girls are voiceless victims in need of rescue by the West.

Kony and his ‘army of children’. Source: Screenshot of Kony2012

Many girls and women are victims of sexual violence, especially in the climate of conflict and instability that has affected a number of African countries in the past decades. But stories of rape and abuse too often eclipse other stories of bravery, resilience and survival.

Even more than boys, girls are denied any agency, any voice; they are denied the possibility to speak out and tell their story as they experienced it and not as we want to hear it.

In some contexts, becoming a soldier can be empowering for them. They can gain power, a surrogate family where they had none, and escape their traditional gender roles.[13] Their experience is too often reduced to the sexual violence they may or may not have undergone. In virtually every documentary I have watched for my dissertation project, girls are interviewed uniquely to talk about their experience of sexual violence, and often asked to provide gruesome details to satisfy the journalist’s, and the public’s, morbid curiosity.

It is not the first and certainly not the last time that women have been misunderstood and misrepresented because of sexist stereotypes. But the tragedy lies in the consequences this has on the ground, for real girls that have served weeks, months, and sometimes years in militias. Because ‘girls don’t fight’, many demobilisation, disintegration and rehabilitation programmes[14] exclude them. Only 5% benefit from them.[15] And when they do, their special needs are rarely addressed: no female clothing in the aid packages, no tampons or pads, no reproductive healthcare, etc. Skills training and camp activities are often biased towards males – learning masonry, carpentry, mechanics etc.[16] When going back to civilian life, because they are labelled as sexual victims, they are affected by a stigma of sexual activity. Whether real or not, this stigma leads to social exclusion. Many girls hide their rebel lives from their family and community and decide not to register for demobilisation because they are too afraid of the consequences – of being seen as monsters, as dangerous rebels, as ‘bush wives’[17] that can no longer marry.

More than anything else, girl child soldiers are victims of the Patriarchy. In the West, which ignores and silences them; and in their own societies that stigmatise and exclude them both as rebels and as trespassers of their gender roles. The child soldier phenomenon is a complex one. Its gender dimension is only one aspect of the issue, but one that deserves much more attention than it gets now.

Movies like Beasts of No Nation, Blood Diamond and Johnny Mad Dog, with a large audience and good critiques, are missed opportunities to challenge a simplistic, essentialist and dangerous understanding of child soldiers.

They perpetuate many harmful ideas and are representative of the status quo on the place of women in war: none. “Just as these films were made mostly by whites and thus show a white bias, so were they made mostly by men and show a male bias.”[18]

—–

[1] Understood as “any person below 18 years of age who is or who has been recruited or used by an armed force or armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to children, boys and girls, used a fighters, cooks, porters, messengers, spies, or for sexual purposes” (The Paris Principles, 2007).

A United Nations Security Council meeting

Sexual exploitation and abuse committed by peacekeepers – and others attached to peacekeeping missions – against the populations they are mandated to protect has been a recurrent issue for the UN. Recognising this, in March 2016 the UN adopted its first Security Council resolution aimed at preventing sexual exploitation and abuse (given the acronym SEA) by those under UN mandate. The development and eventual adoption of this resolution took place in response to widespread reporting of allegations against peacekeepers, especially in the Central African Republic (CAR), as well as claims that peacekeepers continued to enjoy impunity despite evidence of a widespread problem. This resolution – Resolution 2272 – bodes well for accountability for SEA within the UN, something that has been blatantly absent previously. However, it is not a panacea and much will depend on whether and how the resolution is fully implemented in practice.

From the 1990s, monitors in peacekeeping missions began to problematise the sexual conduct of peacekeepers, highlighting among other things issues such as the proliferation of brothels and prostitution at peacekeeping sites, peacekeeper involvement in trafficking, and rape and sexual assault. The UN mission in Cambodia is an oft cited case, made infamous by the head of that mission who responded with ‘boys will be boys’ when Cambodians complained of the sexual misconduct of peacekeepers. Reports have also found that sexual misconduct is not limited to peacekeepers, but that humanitarian and aid workers, government and non-government organisation personnel, and private military contractors commit SEA as well. The Dyncorp scandal, popularised in the film The Whistle Blower, is perhaps the best-known example here. Each time new allegations surface, impunity and lack of accountability are cited as major obstacles for both preventing SEA in peacekeeping missions, and providing justice to those survivors who do report.

The UN mission in Cambodia is an oft cited case, made infamous by the head of that mission who responded with ‘boys will be boys’ when Cambodians complained of the sexual misconduct of peacekeepers.

Following a 2003 bulletin from the Secretary General, the UN instituted a ‘zero-tolerance’ policy on peacekeeper SEA. Zero tolerance explicitly prohibited peacekeeper sexual relations with persons less than 18 years of age; exchange of money, employment, goods or services for sex; and sexual relations between UN staff and beneficiaries of assistance. Yet the zero tolerance approach has had its challenges and has neither improved accountability nor reduced the number of allegations of SEA made against peacekeepers. Due to the extent of under-reporting by victims, and a culture of not reporting incidences of abuse among personnel, zero tolerance is really only effective in those cases that are identified. In turn, because of the legal framework set out by the Status of Forces Agreement (an agreement between the host government and the UN concerning the privileges, immunities and criminal accountability of UN personnel and peacekeepers), close cooperation between troop contributing countries, who are responsible for prosecuting their personnel, and the UN is required. Troop contributing countries have proven reluctant to prosecute those who return with allegations of SEA made against them. While the UN can make moral claims about the ideal performance of its personnel, it has often claimed that it lacks the mechanisms to respond appropriately or enforce accountability given its lack of jurisdiction over peacekeeper personnel.

A multinational group of peacekeepers march at a Bastille Day parade in Paris.

While peacekeeper SEA has been a recurrent issue then, it reached another zenith in terms of public attention in 2015 and 2016. Attention focused on allegations of child abuse by peacekeepers in the CAR, and particularly on the failures of the UN to respond to these allegations. In April 2015, UN aid worker Anders Kompass was suspended for disclosing to French authorities reports of French troop involvement in the sexual abuse of children. While he was eventually exonerated and reinstated, Kompass announced his resignation in June 2016, citing impunity for those who were found to be abusing their authority and lack of accountability. As a result of consistent allegations though, and the public attention they were garnering, the UN established an inquiry into peacekeeper SEA in the CAR, the results of which are yet to be made public; however early reports indicate a widespread problem of sexual misconduct, including allegations of rape of minors and forced bestiality. In late-2015, the head of the mission in the CAR was forcibly resigned by UN Secretary General Ban-ki Moon, a move that perhaps presaged what may become an enforcement of accountability up the food chain for the crimes committed by peacekeepers.

Also in 2015, the NGO Aids Free World leaked an internal UN report that highlighted lack of enforcement of zero tolerance policy, lack of reporting and resultant impunity for peacekeepers who committed SEA. Paula Donavan, who co-founded the NGO, also established the Code Blue campaign to end immunity for peacekeeper SEA and cites the misapplication of the 1946 Convention on Privileges and Immunities, via Status of Forces Agreements, as a major obstacle. The leaking of this report and the widespread reporting of allegations, especially in CAR, led the Security Council to consider a resolution aimed at preventing peacekeeper SEA.

As groundswell grew, a precursor to the adoption of Resolution 2272 was the Secretary General’s report on SEA released in March 2016, which, as well as noting that allegations had increased, for the first time listed the nationalities of those peacekeepers that had had allegations made against them. As part of previously instituted measures to respond to SEA, the Secretary General is obliged to report to the Security Council on the number of allegations for each mission and the status of investigations into those allegations. The listing of nationalities in the March 2016 report was a break from past practice: the long held claim that ‘naming and shaming’ countries that contributed troops that went on to be accused of SEA would be reluctant to contribute troops in the future – not an insignificant concern given difficulties in raising numbers for peacekeeping missions. As the UN has frequently cited that accountability enforcement lies with troop contributing countries, the idea that naming and shaming those countries that do not act would force their hand is considered to be one tool in the UN’s arsenal for ensuring accountability. The reluctance to do this has been viewed as acquiescence to politics over and above the rights and needs of abuse survivors.

The reluctance to do this has been viewed as acquiescence to politics over and above the rights and needs of abuse survivors.

It is not surprising then that the UN has previously been criticised for an apathetic response to allegations of SEA. While the problem is by no means resolved, Resolution 2272 marks a new break, in some respects, from how peacekeeper SEA has been handled previously. It is the first time the Security Council has devoted a session to the issue of SEA, much less adopted a resolution devoted to preventing it. As well as reaffirming zero tolerance, it mandates for the repatriation of entire military contingents or police units with allegations made against them. This is a significant change, beyond a lackadaisical implementation of zero tolerance, signalling a preparedness to put prevention of SEA above the politics of the Security Council. Should repatriation of entire contingents occur, this would, in effect, be a ‘naming and shaming’ of those countries because the repatriation of entire units cannot be done discreetly. This makes the repatriation of entire units – when and if that occurs – a deeply political statement. The resolution notes that the primary responsibility of investigating allegations of peacekeeper SEA still lies with troop contributing countries, but in essence establishes a response mechanism – repatriation – if the actions of troop contributing countries are found wanting.

There are however, a couple of potential problems facing the implementation of Resolution 2272. First, is in defining what the resolution actually stipulates. As Kelly Neudorfer has pointed out, terms in the resolution – in particular the criteria of “systematic and widespread” and “credible allegations” – remain undefined: that is, what constitutes ‘widespread and systematic’ and what is considered a ‘credible allegation’? Furthermore, where is the tipping point that needs to be reached for the resolution, and thus repatriation, to be triggered? These as well leave aside the important question of whether repatriation of entire contingents will eventually occur, even if these triggers are both defined and met. Inherent in the sending home of whole contingents is a preparedness to name and shame countries whose peacekeepers abuse. Given how such processes can be politicised, it is important that the implementation of Resolution 2272 does not succumb to the same political machinations that have seen a deep reluctance to name and shame troop contributing countries take precedent over accountability for peacekeeper SEA.

Second, it is unclear whether the repatriation of entire units will lead to better justice outcomes for survivors, when and if repatriation does happen. Certainly there is an immediate effect of removing perpetrators from the environment in which they are committing abuses. However, in terms of broader justice outcomes for survivors, the repatriation process raises some questions, even if the opaqueness of the resolutions terms is set aside. In the past, individual perpetrators of SEA have been repatriated, quietly removed from peacekeeping sites. This has in effect contributed to the silence surrounding the issue, as the perpetrator is no longer accessible, to their accuser or to investigating units (both local and UN) that are under-resourced and/or unwilling to pursue the matter forcibly. Even if a worthy investigation is conducted, it rests with the troop contributing country to act on it, which has proven unlikely. Based on my research in Timor-Leste, the repatriation of individuals is actually associated with limited justice outcomes and continuing impunity for peacekeepers – it was a source of frustration that perpetrators would disappear, not to face justice in the country. No information on what happened to the accused was provided to victims once they were removed from the mission. To quietly remove an offender, where they are out of access of accusers, to a home country unwilling to prosecute, does little in terms of justice or real change in the institutional culture.

While the adoption of Resolution 2272 deserves credit where credit is due, there justifiably remain questions in terms of both its scope and implementation. These relate chiefly to the exact parameters of the resolution and what the terms therein mean, which in turn impacts when and how the resolution is implemented. At the very least, at an institutional level, the adoption of Resolution 2272 represents a rhetorical commitment, a break from past practice – some evidence of institutional steps towards improved transparency and accountability. The practice of Resolution 2272 will need to move beyond rhetoric though if the prevention – the stated aim of the resolution – and, ideally, improved justice outcomes for survivors, are to be met.

We put a call out on our Twitter and Facebook accounts on Friday afternoon asking for contributions to this special feature on what the EU has meant to women working in academia in the UK, and their thoughts on the referendum result. We received a huge response. But first, some background – I was in London last week, and woke at 6am the morning after the UK’s EU membership referendum to hear Nigel Farage’s voice coming from my friend’s radio, hailing a ‘historic day’ for the UK. My immediate reaction was one of shock – going to bed the night before, it had seemed to all of us in the house that “Remain” was going to take it, albeit by a slim margin. Following the disbelief came the sadness and worry for the friends I have living all over the UK – what would happen now? Four women live in the house I was staying in, located in south London – two of whom are Scottish, one English and one Welsh. All are devastated by the referendum result.

I would not know any of these women had I not gone abroad to Paris on Erasmus during my third year of undergraduate study. One of the Scots was the first person I met when I moved to Paris, and today she is one of my best and closest friends. My Erasmus year set me on my career path and opened up so many opportunities for me, from studying for my MA in London, to living and working in Brussels, and then returning to work in London again in the year before I began my PhD in Dublin. Without the EU, much of this would not have been possible, and so many of the friends I have I would never have met. I am lucky to be from Ireland and to be researching in Ireland – my Irish passport means I don’t have to worry about my freedom of movement or any of the other many benefits which EU membership affords me. But my friends, and many academics around the UK, no longer feel so lucky.

EU funding is vital to the UK’s higher education institutions, as are EU and international citizens. EU and international citizens, whether as students, researchers or lecturers, along with EU funding, have made the UK’s higher education sector one of the most lively and exciting environments to work in, and study at, in the world.

What follows are the words of twelve female academics in different fields, from the UK and elsewhere in the EU, working in Northern Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales. They demonstrate the massive importance and influence that the EU has on academic research, and elucidate the doubt and worry that many now feel, both in and outside academia.

“Trying to understand security and counter-terrorism on a national level alone has value, but misses so much of what happens to shape the national story as a result of transnational dynamics and institutions such as the EU.”

All of my university education was in Ireland. In fact, all of it was in UCC where I studied law for seven very happy years. And so, it was a (not unwelcome) shock to the system when I moved first to a chair in Durham and then to my current post at Professor of Global Legal Studies in the University of Birmingham to discover, be challenged by, and ultimately relish in the intellectually diverse and internationally-oriented world of UK higher education. While international and European law had been important in my education and work in Ireland, the richness that Europeanism brought to the student body, my academic community, and the vision and ambition in legal research of the institutions in which I have worked in the UK was energising, challenging and enthralling. That is the first way in which the EU has impacted my career in the UK. It has been a force for diversification of the people, ideas, institutions and challenges with which I try to pursue the key question in which I am interested: what happens to power, law and politico-legal institutions when crises put them under pressure?

For much of my career I have explored this question in the very particular context or counter-terrorism and security, including leading a major cross-national, inter-disciplinary and empirical project entitled SECILE (Securing Europe through Counter-Terrorism: Impact, legitimacy, and effectiveness). With generous funding from the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme I led a consortium of researchers, NGOs and SMEs in the UK, Ireland, Norway and Latvia in a project that both mapped and analysed EU counter-terrorism and, through interviews with major stakeholders in the EU’s institutions and the member states, tried to understand their real world impact on everyday operations and the experience of living in the European Union. This could not have been achieved without EU membership: that created the opportunity to secure the funding, the relationships that underpinned and made possible our consortium, and the access to high level officials in Europe that helped us both access information and gain traction for our findings.

Trying to understand security and counter-terrorism on a national level alone has value, but misses so much of what happens to shape the national story as a result of transnational dynamics and institutions such as the EU. If Brexit brings us out of these funding structures our ability to ask ‘big questions’ in ‘big contexts’ will be sharply constrained. And what, then, will incentivise the very best researchers who have other possibilities through EU or other citizenship, to remain with the UK’s universities? Will national funding structures, already so stretched, step in to compensate? Will the UK retain sufficient influence in Europe to secure access to these key actors and institutions? Will our colleagues from other EU countries, whose impact on law schools all over this country has been such a key part in diversifying our enquiries and deepening our intellectual ambitions, move on? Will possibilities for staff and student exchange shrink, impoverishing our everyday intellectual environment? And if so, what will be the motivation for people who, like me, have Irish citizenship to stay?

For now many, like me, will be committed to staying and to contributing to the task of thinking our way out of the corner Brexit has placed higher education and legal research in, but one suspects we will also remain deeply aware of the Irish passport that leaves open possibilities for mobility that we may, reluctantly, find ourselves exercising in coming years.

“Waking up to the Leave result on 24th June felt like a punch in my stomach.”

A few months ago, I was walking on Brighton beach with a fellow EU academic migrant. Reflecting on our academic lives, he observed that mine was a “very European trajectory”. I replied that indeed it was, and I was proud of it.

I feel strongly about my European identity. As part of the Italian diaspora, my family has been scattered in North America, South America, and Australia for generations. My own parents were living and working in the US when my mother got pregnant with me. However, they decided to move back to Italy because they wanted me to be born there – and, thus, in Europe.

Like many others, my academic “European trajectory” began with an Erasmus. I studied for one year of my master’s in Paris, and, thanks to the EU Erasmus Programme, the credits I gained at Paris IV Sorbonne were recognised by my Italian home Institution, Università degli Studi di Milano. Today, 26th June 2016, the homepage of the largest student-led online resource on the programme reads:

EU mobility programmes, to and from the UK, would be a huge post-Brexit lost opportunity for future academics. The idea for my PhD project – temporality in contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction – was born in Paris, when I discovered Michel Houellebecq’s La possibilité d’une île in a second-hand bookshop near my university. The project was then developed in another European country, the UK, where it was funded by the University of Nottingham’s European Union Research Excellence Scholarship. My research also benefited from a period, funded by Erasmus Mundus, spent at the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University. In short, my scholarship was nurtured by the EU and by the education systems of four of its countries.

Waking up to the Leave result on 24th June felt like a punch in my stomach. My visceral reaction was that I would go back to Europe – but even typing this sentence feels odd: the UK is still, technically, part of the EU and is certainly part of Europe geographically and historically. Yet it is undoubtable that the country is moving in a direction I am uncomfortable with, a sentiment shared by that 48% which voted Remain, including friends and colleagues. I have a life in the UK and a three-year teaching fellowship starting on 1st August, but uncertainty looms large: what rights will I have in this country? Can my new institution renege the contract if/when the UK leaves the EU? What happens with my UK-based job applications in the supposed two-year period needed to negotiate Brexit: will they be immediately discarded, as my right to work in this country remains unclear? This is all very imponderable, disempowering, and scary – especially as an Early Career Researcher.

When I was offered my new job at Harlaxton College, I was struck by the irony of a European teaching a module on British identity to US students coming to the UK. Post-referendum, this is a much stronger feeling. And so, in the face of uncertainty, I am working to incorporate in the syllabus Rupert Thomson’s Divided Kingdom, a dystopian novel in which the UK has been divided into four Quarters, each one based upon different humors and personality types. How appropriate.

Diljeet Bhachu, doctoral student, Reid School of Music, University of Edinburgh.

“I have to ask, will there be anything left to research? If we lose diversity in our music and music education, will I want to be researching it?’

As a very early-career researcher − mid-PhD − the impact of the UK leaving the EU on my future plans and job prospects hasn’t quite sunk in yet. I can’t say I’d done much planning, because on Wednesday I felt like the world was my oyster, I could look for post-PhD jobs anywhere, there were options both in and out of the academy. Now? I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll be able to find work abroad. I don’t know if there will be jobs outside of academia.

While I haven’t looked at the details, I imagine it’ll likely be more difficult to get research funding, travel for fieldwork and conferences, and it’s quite possible that the diversity of staff and students at UK HEIs will also suffer. I don’t yet know exactly what Brexit means for university funding both through core and research grant funding, and income from tuition fees. What I do know is that there will be inevitable change in the demographics of our student bodies, if not from changes in access to opportunity, but from the indirect effects of removing the UKs status as a place where non-UK students are welcome. While Universities and other HEIs have been quick to release statements showing support for all students, particularly those from EU countries, and pledging no change to terms of study in the near future, can we guarantee that the cities and towns in which these students will live will be as supportive? Never mind the economic impact of living in a country where the currency has faced its biggest drop in value for 30 years.

With the growing visibility of the far-right, xenophobic, racist views in UK society, my concern now turns towards my research interests. As a #proudchildofanimmigrant (of two immigrants, actually), I question how research that attempts to embrace all cultures, and cater to the increasingly diverse classrooms created by immigration over the past century or so, fits in a country where many, albeit not all, Leave voters are clinging onto an idea of British Nationalism that reads as White British Nationalism. Where is the space in this new reality of an “independent” Britain for post-colonial critique – following a campaign that laughed in the face of many British citizens who are here as the very result of Britain’s colonial past. Why is my curriculum white? Is this a question “independent” Britain still wants to ask? Only time will tell, maybe I’m over-reacting, but is it really unrealistic to consider that some of this might be a possibility?

This may represent the views of a few, but their fires have been fuelled by this “victory” and I’m not sure they can be extinguished.

As I’ve said, it’s early days – who knows what will happen. But while I’ve been writing this, a few bits of information have come to light. Education research gets 43.13% of its funding from the EU. This is a sector that already bore the brunt of cuts. Add to that my position as a researcher of music education. I have to ask, will there be anything left to research? If we lose diversity in our music and music education, will I want to be researching it? We can’t pretend music and music education are separate things. Without the ability to tour easily, are we going to see a decline in the music profession in the UK?

Dr. Jessica Meyer, University Academic Fellow in Legacies of War, University of Leeds.

“24th June 2016 was a very bad day for me indeed.”

February 2015 was a good month for me. On the 3rd I was offered a permanent job at the university where I had been working on a temporary contract for the previous four years. Two weeks later I received a European Research Council Starting Grant, worth €1.07 million, to undertake a project examining the medical and social care provided to disabled British ex-servicemen of the First World War. Within a fortnight, I had not only achieved a measure of professional and personal security, but I had also been given the opportunity to pursue a project that I had conceived as a PhD student ten years earlier, a project which I never thought would ever be funded.

This project involves creating a database of information held in 22,8289 personal pension files created by the Ministry of Pensions and now held at the National Archive. The goal is to make analysis of this archive easier and the archive itself more searchable. In creating the database, my team and I (there are four of us altogether) are also identifying files which contain material suitable for further close reading, including letters from pensioners and their friends and family, medical reports and official documentation. We are particularly interested in the stories that these files have to tell about the roles that families, particularly women, played in providing care to these men, and how these women’s work shaped cultural understandings of medical caregiving as a gendered practice. Eventually, I hope to expand the project to include comparative discussions of the care provided to ex-servicemen in other European nations in the aftermath of the Great War.

This is a huge project, and one which no British grant making body would fund. Neither the AHRC nor the ESRC allow for postgraduate funding to be built into grants, and the remits of even their large individual grants are relatively narrow. The Leverhulme Trust, which funds projects with a similar sort of boundary-pushing ambition as the ERC, does not have a scheme that enables team building on the scale necessary to complete this project. If I were not funded by the ERC, this project would not happen.

So 24th June 2016 was a very bad day for me indeed. The Vice Chancellor of my university put out a reassuring statement to the effect that ‘We also believe that the University’s study abroad programmes and our involvement in Horizon 2020 [which includes the ERC] … will remain unchanged during this period of transition.’ But belief is not certainty, particularly not in a period where nothing feels certain, and the period of transition may not cover the entirety of the period of my grant. The money has been committed, I am told, and so I email my team members to reassure them that their post-docs and PhD studies will go ahead as planned. I hope I am right.

And even if the funding remains, what about the terms? ERC grant-holders are expected to spend 6 months of every 12 in an EU member state. Will I have to relocate to Ireland for 6 months of every year after 2018? I have a young family. What are the implications for that hard-won personal security that seemed so sure 15 months ago? Everything that I have worked for in my academic career feels directly threatened by the referendum result.

For the moment I carry on, trying to believe that the work I am doing, which I believe passionately in, will be funded for the term and at the terms agreed. But I don’t know, and that insecurity will shape my research for the foreseeable future.

“Through Erasmus and therefore because of the EU, I learnt my very first lessons about what it means to be a scientist.”

I work on inflammation. To put it simply, that’s one process by which the body restores the status quo when it detects that something’s amiss, whether that’s a cut to the hand or a cold virus in the nose. An army of white blood cells is mobilised to deal with the problem, and when it’s resolved, it stands down again. Except sometimes it doesn’t, and the inflammation becomes chronic. That’s what I’m interested in: uncontrolled inflammation, how it starts, and what happens when it doesn’t end.

Back in 2004, though, I was a second-year undergraduate, and I didn’t have research interests yet.Not really. I was studying Genetics with German (‘Did you pick it for the alliteration,’ people asked), which allowed me to combine studying the finer points of gene regulation with German language, literature and history, and I was about to go off on my year abroad through the Erasmus scheme. A rite of passage for modern languages students, for me, it would involve a year working in a German lab. The application form asked what kind of lab I wanted to be placed in. ‘Genetics. Please not plants,’ I wrote. I ended up at the University of Heidelberg, working on the genetics of diabetes-related kidney disease, and that was my future career settled. Ten and more years later, I’m still researching the complications of diabetes, albeit from a different angle.

Through Erasmus and therefore because of the EU, I learnt my very first lessons about what it means to be a scientist. By that, I mean the lab and analysis skills that I use every day – how to plan, perform, analyse, evaluate and write up an experiment – but also about the importance of the international community to which I belong. The lab I worked in was funded by the EU; we had collaborators in the Czech Republic; I trained a student from Slovakia; my boss was Dutch. My friends in another lab spanned a multitude of nationalities. In the UK, being a British scientist who spoke fluent German was a novelty; in Germany, every scientist had a good command of at least one extra language, usually more. I suddenly realised how inward looking the UK could be, and that if I wanted to be a successful scientist, I mustn’t be like that. I needed to connect with people, with as many people as possible from as many places as possible, and discuss ideas and plans and visions. That was how to grow.

I am upset about the referendum result for many reasons, but a big one is the thought that future generations of UK-born scientists won’t have the chances that I had. I had the freedom then to go off and study abroad; I have the freedom now to go and work in a lab anywhere in the EU. I worry about what that means for the development of young scientists. I worry too about the future of science in the UK: how attractive will our universities be to the very best, when our immigration policies grow ever more restrictive? And I worry for my country, which has just seen victory for a campaign based on the idea that shrinking our horizons is a positive thing. It isn’t.

In a month or so, my research is taking me to Heidelberg again, this time for a conference. I am sadder than I can say that this might be the last time I go as an EU citizen.

“After the vote just a couple of days ago, I feel that all of a sudden the country where I chose to build my career and my family has edged away from the Europe I love and was born in.”

The result of the Brexit referendum caught a lot of people by complete surprise. It left many of us in tears, in deep uncertainty and has led us to question our life choices. This surely happened to me. I am Italian by birth, live in Scotland now, having moved there in 2011: my husband is Scottish but we actually met in England. I am a proud graduate from University College Dublin, in Ireland, where I read for a Masters’ degree in European Law, and of the University of Birmingham, where I gained my PhD in Law, and my first lecturing post was in the University of Liverpool, in the beating, anarchic heart of the North West of England (sorry, Manchester, but the Scousers win it hands down with me). It is not an exaggeration to say that the “EU made me”, personally, professionally and in some of the aspects of my deepest being. I am a strongly minded European: my birth in Italy has given me the passion for the Classics, the Opera and the boundless love of my wonderful family, yet Ireland and the United Kingdom formed me as an academic.

My area of expertise is also deeply imbued by the European project: I am a competition lawyer. I research market dynamics and how the law ensures that they remain genuine, unhindered by outside pressures, such as monopoly positions that may be abused or concerted behaviour aimed at reaping higher, unjustified profits to the detriment of citizens. Yet, I am not, in the best European tradition, a free-marketer: I think that markets should be protected and cherished to the extent that, and because, they secure best outcomes, in terms of quality and of prices, for individuals and for the societies that they touch with their functioning. Ultimately, they must work to nurture individual freedom, not the pockets of the few: they must function in harmony with the environment, not to destroy it; they must uphold the needs of the communities they affect, not secure lower levels of protection for them.

The health emergency of alcohol abuse in Scotland prompted me to embark on my most recent piece of work: the controversy on whether the Scottish Parliament can enact rules setting minimum prices for the retail sale of alcoholic beverages with a view to pricing out of the market the cheapest, strongest and thus most dangerous drinks seemed to me perhaps the best example of evidence-based policy. Backed by a number of independent studies, this legislation was poised to make a true contribution to addressing alcohol misuse, especially among the poorest and most disadvantaged. Yet, the snag, which was picked up by none other than the Scotch Whisky Association, who have eventually taken the Scottish Ministers to court in Scotland and also in Luxembourg, was that setting floor prices can actually interfere with the flow of trade among Member States… by making imported goods instantly not as attractive as they could otherwise be in their country of origin, where lower prices than the statutory minimum can be applied.

This instantly made me wonder whether competition on grounds of prices is after all so important: at the end of the day, do the EU treaties not say that achieving goals of high levels of, among others, public health protection is central to the European project? This is what I have been trying to find out, and on Friday, namely the fateful day after the referendum on whether the UK should leave the EU, I finished the second draft of this paper. Yet, is it still going to be relevant? Surely, competition law is very much part of domestic law in the UK, and these issues will always remain alive. They say that the UK economy is an open and market-minded one: yet, it was only thanks to the impact of the European project that mechanisms for the enforcement of the competition rules and the avoidance of the creation of harmful position of market powers eventually were legislated for; the UK Competition Act is also fundamentally influenced by the EU Treaties.

I sit here in Edinburgh, a city with a strong European heart: Mary Stuart lived literally ten minutes away from my front room, and she was French. Yet, after the vote just a couple of days ago, I feel that all of a sudden the country where I chose to build my career and my family has edged away from the Europe I love and was born in, just that tiny bit more for me to feel comfortable and serene personally, as well as confident in my academic outlook, on the way in which I look at and study markets and try to contribute to public debate with my scholarship. I had so many plans as to how to bring this agenda forward: the impact of the new EU rules on tobacco trade on competition within the internal market, as well as on the freedom to express “commercial ideas” was up next, yet I am now unsure whether it is now a viable project. All of a sudden, being on a tiny island does not make it fun for me anymore.

As a researcher into how governance of our oceans can adapt to enable society to respond to the complex challenges of sustainable development, I can only see ‘Brexit’ as a huge backwards step. Simply put, addressing big challenges requires co-operation, openness, long-term thinking and integration, particularly when dealing with issues that are transboundary. These progressive features were supported by the EU, and will be extremely compromised outside of it.

Sustainable development is, by its nature, a complicated concept, and is interpreted differently by individuals according to their values, culture and what they represent in society. How do we protect the environment, but still enable economic development and gathering of resources to support communities? Should we conserve ecosystems for their intrinsic value, or is it acceptable to treat nature as a service-provider for humanity? What if our market-based economy is incompatible with maintaining a healthy natural environment? These questions are not easy to grapple with, but what I have learnt is that we need to talk about it to get anywhere. In my research I am exploring how we start to address these issues on a smaller scale, and related to our use of the seas.

I focus specifically on an increasingly utilised governance tool called marine spatial planning (MSP), which provides a ‘real world’ situation, where we (as a society made up of the state, NGOs, scientists, communities and others) can look at ‘sustainable development’ in the context of activities that relate to our own situation – our jobs, our view from the house, the fish we eat. Briefly, MSP provides a process of planning ahead for various marine activities and ecosystem protection in a particular region of sea, in an integrated way. This has the benefit of moving away from fragmented management of different industries and interests and explore the most ‘sustainable’ combination of development in an area and involving civil society in the process. Using social science, I am looking at the methods that we can use to explore future possible scenarios through MSP, identify how we manage potential conflicts for space or resources and debate how ecological and social limits are respected. At least that’s the idea…

Conceptually, MSP makes sense, but it faces key challenges, made harder following a vote by the UK to leave the EU. Oceans do not respect national boundaries. Our human activities (shipping, tourism, etc.) and habitats and species operate across boundaries hence the committed drive to increasingly co-operate and integrate between countries of the EU. This includes sharing data and information, aligning our processes, sharing experience and knowledge, collaboratively funding the science essential to improving practice, developing joint ‘visions’ to drive national policy and motivate industries and stakeholders, and many, many more. It saddens me greatly that the UK may now not be a leading participant in such co-operation and which compromises our ability to progress in answering these fundamental questions which define our future. But I am determined to fight for ensuring support for science, to improving the voice of scientists in the political arena and maintaining co-operation with European institutions and organisations on these issues.

“Free movement and the right to work has been an essential part of enabling the collaborative relationships that form my work.”

I am a practice-researcher: my research includes performing and composing both as its methodology and its outputs. This type of research is different from written research because it can’t necessarily be enacted without its public-facing and collaborative dimensions (this is not to say that these aren’t important to other researchers, but that they are more often central to practice research). My personal research directions involve the performance of sound in space, iterative processes of composition, and the enactment of extended open notation by partly improvising musicians. As my career has progressed this research has taken place on a global, and particularly European stage. I have recently returned from a tour of performances in Germany and Scotland, working with musicians from the UK, Germany, America, and Iceland. My most recent commission has come from an international contemporary music festival in Belgium; the piece will be performed alongside music by other composers from the UK, Belgium and Portugal by a pianist, Ian Pace, who has made his career on the international stage, performing music from most continents.

This serves to illustrate that research in the arts, by its nature, crosses borders. The collaborations that I have made have been central to the development and dissemination of my ideas. Music cannot be realised without musicians and practice research can’t exist without its practice. But these collaborations are not arbitrary either: the musical tradition that I work in (often called New Music (Neue Musik, derived from a definition made by Theodor Adorno) is, essentially, a Central European tradition, albeit one that draws musicians from America, Australia and Asia. The contemporary musical traditions in the UK, outside of key institutions like the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, have not historically supported this music as other EU countries have done.

Free movement and the right to work has been an essential part of enabling the collaborative relationships that form my work: the ability for me to travel to Europe, to have the right to work and play there, and to be able to invite European musicians to work and perform in the UK means that this work can take place without administrative hurdles that would obscure the research aims. I am worried about the future possibilities for my collaborators in the UK, and for the future potential for me to continue to develop my work in Europe. The potential for the arts to flourish without our European partners is narrow, and this will also impact the development of the arts and therefore the development of research in the arts. As a postgraduate student of composition I was advised by my supervisors to look to Europe as my workplace, and this is advice I’ve continued to give my postgraduate students. I now wonder what the future for their work, as well as mine, will be.

“Without the opportunities given to me by the EU, my life would look very different today.”

Just a little of under three years ago, I moved to the UK as a freshly recruited researcher working on a major project between three Welsh universities investigating 260 years of travel from mainland Europe to Wales. Since then, this all-female team of researchers have unearthed an unanticipated amount of accounts from 17 countries, written in 15 languages. Needless to say, if I coloured in a map according to the countries of origin for each of these travellers, I’d look at something that would not be much different from the EU. We are still in the middle of evaluating our sources, but one thing is clear: the reasons why people come to Wales were as diverse two hundred years ago as they are today. There are holiday makers scrambling across rocky mountain terrain in all sorts of weather; there are refugees escaping political persecution and wars; there are lovers who establish their family lives in this country; there are engineers who marvel at the great bridges and industry of Wales; there are the artists who have painted and sketched every inch of this country; and – this is where I find myself coming into the picture – there are the scholars investigating Welsh literature, history and language. Two-hundred and sixty years of all these different paths of life connecting the mainland with these islands and as of Friday morning, it seems like this proud tradition is coming undone.

My own history as a German in this country is not exclusively tied to this research project but took off in a roundabout manner in Berlin during a night-time press conference in November 1989. That night, a high-ranking East German politician ‘miss-spoke’ in front of dozens of cameras when an Italian reporter pressed him on the status of the East German border. Less than a year later, the GDR was wiped off the face of the European map as it reunited with West Germany and thus joined the European Community.

Fast-forward sixteen-years to my time as an MA student at Leipzig University where I was enrolled in British Studies as my first major and German as a Second Language as my second subject. When I was given the opportunity in 2005 to apply for the ERASMUS programme, I jumped on the opportunity for one of two precious placements available at Bangor University. Never in my wildest dreams had I anticipated studying abroad, let alone studying in the UK with its tuition fees way beyond my financial means. If it hadn’t been for the EU, studying English Literature and teaching German to undergrad students at Bangor University would have forever remained a pipe dream. It probably would have also meant that I would not have been introduced to the rich and beautiful literature coming from Wales which formed the basis for my later PhD research.

Without the opportunities given to me by the EU, my life would look very different today. The freedom of movement guaranteed by the EU allowed me to return to the UK during my time as PhD student when I dug my way through the Bangor University Archive and Special Collection, the National Library of Wales and the British Library on multiple occasions. The freedom of movement also meant that I could travel to conferences across Europe while being spared the exasperating experience of applying for visitors’ visas, like my German colleagues who travelled to Russia for their research.

Without the EU, I would most likely not have felt encouraged to pursue work as an academic and I would have missed out on this great international network of intellectual exchange and the building of cultural bridges. Learning Welsh would have been much more difficult, too, as schools providing classes for adult learners are heavily dependent on EU funding. So is the National Library of Wales, one of the main collaborators for the current project, or the museums in Wales with whom I teamed up over the course of the previous two years to create a free travelling exhibition. With the Brexit on all of our doorsteps, it seems these institutions, who already struggle for survival owing to chronic underfunding during these years of austerity, will fade into the inevitable cultural twilight.

I am not a politician and can therefore make no predictions about my future in this country. All I know is that as of Friday, all bets are off and I am looking at setting up a ‘Plan B’ down the road which does not rule out a return to Germany, hoping that I may be able to continue with my research on the culture and history of Wales.

“It didn’t take a great deal to convince me, like many involved in higher education, that remaining within the EU was the most beneficial option.”

Had there been a more stable and competent government, I may have voted for an arrangement similar to that of Norway and the EU. I initially kept an open mind on Brexit, and did my research on what the key issues would be for my career, family and quality of life. It didn’t take a great deal to convince me, like many involved in higher education, that remaining within the EU was the most beneficial option. Archaeologists are the international wanderers of academia, with constant global collaboration on shared projects. It’s a facet of the profession I’ve loved – learning and being accepted on a world-wide basis. If anything, all the travel and research has reinforced just how much we all have in common across Europe.

The EU has reciprocated that constant interaction of archaeologists by offering funding to heritage and research sectors. The Times Higher Education supplement of June 24th 2016 placed that funding contribution to UK archaeology as around 28%. Leaving the EU means that effectively we have almost a third less available finance to stimulate new projects, consolidate old ones and create employment. It’s obvious that the Brexit vote will have an extremely negative influence on the education sector of the UK, although with statements from people like Michael Gove, there’s a strong feeling of anti-intellectualism or academic specialisation within those who voted to leave the EU. I can only presume they don’t realise that new research stimulates employment across all sectors, not just academia. Universities have already accepted too many cut-backs and perhaps I am being pessimistic, but cannot see a Far-Right Brexit-led government being far-sighted enough to replace the 28% funding we shall lose from Europe.

I worked in the media before entering academia and if I’m capable of any talent in this, it’s translating the past into something relevant and vibrant for the present, making academic issues accessible to all. People love heritage and archaeology because it is fascinating. But it’s also so important to show how much we have in common. The entire heritage sector feels exceptionally apprehensive at the moment, that we will have no fiscal value under such a Far-Right government. I am lucky in that I am Irish/Northern Irish; my passport is Irish and as such I remain a member of the European Union. I can still work with colleagues in Europe, though I fear I may never be employed in the UK. That 28% will take a terrible toll in jobs, and I suspect my own future waits for me on the Continent – I’ll be one of the new breed of Wild Geese which this political event will generate. I am overwhelmingly sad and angry for UK colleagues who do not have this option. However, I know that universities in the UK will do all they can (especially my alma mater of QUB), so am hopeful – academics are an altruistic lot, and resourceful too. I reckon we just need to keep hoping and teaching to overcome all the vitriol.

Dr. Viviane Gravey, Senior Research Associate, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of East Anglia.

“Overnight, the UK is suddenly not such a great place to build a research career anymore.”

As a political scientist working on EU policies and politics, the European Union is not only a potential funder for both my research and that of my colleagues but also the object of my study. As a French citizen living and working in the UK, the European Union not only shapes my professional life but also my private life: rights to work, access the health service, protection against discrimination, right to vote in local and European election. A Brexit puts all of these in question. It will also cast a long shadow on my teaching EU politics in the UK: how will my students, some of whom won’t have been old enough to vote on Thursday, engage with the EU in the coming years and months?

In the last few months I have been involved in efforts by social scientists across the UK to provide facts to voters, trying to raise the profile of environmental issues in this campaign – I am one of these “experts” Michael Gove argued the public is tired of hearing from. We studied different Brexit scenarios. We will now have the dubious privilege of seeing whether the environmental protections and rights which we identified as at risk in case of a vote to Leave, will indeed be weakened or removed. Great for our research, potentially not so great for the environment in the UK…

That someone like me – studying the European Union – is to be affected by Thursday’s vote is really a no-brainer. And while the impacts on my private life and rights will be negative (if I stay in the UK I will be disenfranchised, lose some protections), the vote could open interesting avenues for further research for public policy scholars, as the UK will have to renegotiate so many international agreements and revise so many of its own laws.

I am far less sanguine for my colleagues working in other fields, both hard and social scientists, both from the UK or long-term residents in this country. On Friday, two senior colleagues shared what would normally have been very good news: they had both secured EU Horizon 2020 funding for their research. These grants would effectively pay their wages for part of the year for the next three years. But then, what next? Would these grants be the last EU funding for which they’d be eligible?

The full force of a Brexit impact on research in the UK won’t be felt for many months or even years. For permanent staff, this could mean losing out on cutting edge research funding. For early career researchers on short-term contracts, for PhD students trying to get their first post-docs, this means an even smaller pool of jobs to compete for in the UK. Overnight, the UK is suddenly not such a great place to build a research career anymore, and as we discussed the referendum over coffee, many started openly contemplating continuing their work abroad, be it to the rest of Europe, the US or Commonwealth countries.

“The outcome is likely to have long-term implications for women across Europe.”

One of the big silences in the recent EU referendum has been the impact of a possible Brexit on British women and European women residing in the UK. Now that the verdict is out, many of us have been left wondering what Brexit actually means for us. Gender equality was never one of the key issues in the Referendum. Now that the UK is facing a new political and economic environment made up of economic and constitutional challenges, it is unlikely to surface at the top of the political agenda. Yet, the outcome is likely to have long-term implications for women across Europe.

I completed my PhD on the UK and Italian implementation of the 1992 Pregnant Worker Directive many years ago. My understanding of the relationship between national politics and European institutions seems more relevant now than ever. I spent the next twenty years looking at the development of the European equality agenda, and like many others I focused on the shortcomings and unfulfilled promises. This year’s Referendum campaign, however, forced me to look at the EU’s role as a gender actor in a completely different light.

Looking at the relationship between UK equality policies and the EU draws attention to the role and influence of the transnational feminist movement and the importance of finding a platform for women’s rights advocacy beyond the state. The UK’s withdrawal clearly poses additional obstacles to women’s right organisations seeking to expand the equality agenda at the national level.

The recent economic crisis of 2008 had a detrimental impact on women’s position in the labour market. Austerity policies have weakened women’s position in the public sphere and the official labour market. Key services aimed at women’s activation have been depleted by various rounds of austerity measures. The crisis allowed policy makers to side-line gender equality in the pursuit of higher political and economic goals.

The result of the Referendum brings into question the longevity of key equality policies, e.g. maternity rights, introduced to fulfil the requirements of European legislation. Focus on cutting red tape during the campaign did not address one key issue: equal rights, maternity rights and equal opportunity policies are often seen as red tape by those seeking to liberalise the market. The UK has a well established body of equality legislation, but in a post-Brexit environment it not clear which institutional structures and mechanisms will be put in place to ensure basic standards are maintained.

The EU’s role as a gender actor has not lived up to feminists’ expectations. Equality is one of its fundamental values, but there is a growing gulf between rhetoric and reality. The kind of equality agenda produced has been largely driven by economic imperatives. However, it has produced a body of legislation that normalised the idea of gender equality in the labour market. It has provided a platform for feminist organisations to lobby beyond the Member States. It has given space to Femocrats (feminist bureaucrats) to promoting far reaching legislation in the area of pregnancy protection. The question now for women is: can UK actors/policy agencies fill the void left by European institutions?

Northern Ireland’s 1998 Good Friday Agreement contains many references to equality and human rights, andone specific reference to the “full and equal participation of women in public life”. Women were also involved at important points in the negotiating process, leading many to believe that the Agreement could significantly transform women’s roles in Northern Ireland. Michelle Rouse argues, however, that in the 18 years since the Good Friday Agreement was signed, parties to the process have failed to capitalise on that potential and in its absence a particularly negative legal and political discourse on gender now dominates Northern Ireland.

There is nothing new under the sun, or so the idiom goes at least, and the gender dynamics which lurk beneath the surface of the Northern Irish peace process would certainly appear to support this assessment. It is an enduring truth that women remain the most historically marginalised and excluded group across all conflicts and all jurisdictions. It is equally true that women and men will experience conflict in different ways and will have very different needs in the post-conflict period. Feminist analysis of conflict suggests that applying a gender lens to how specific issues of human rights, security and political participation are framed in peace agreements may provide an effective litmus test for how women’s specific needs will be addressed in the post-conflict system. In other words, we need to give specific attention to the issue of gender if we are to fully understand the ways in which women are served or underserved by the Good Friday Agreement and the current system in Northern Ireland. This piece shines a spotlight on a significant failing of Northern Ireland’s world renowned peace process – namely, that it has systematically failed to address the post-conflict needs of women.

Stormont, Belfast – the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

How are Human Rights and Gender Equality spelled out in the Good Friday Agreement?

The Good Friday Agreement affirms “the right of equal opportunity in all social and economic activity, regardless of class, creed, disability, gender or ethnicity’. This “duty” is located within the Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity Section of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA). This was enacted in legislation by Section 75 of the subsequent 1998 Northern Ireland Act. The section 75 duty was exalted by many as ‘unique and world leading’, earning the impressive moniker of the ‘single most extensive positive duty imposed in the UK’.

The statutory equality duty has not delivered in respect of gendered inequality: reasons why

The available evidence however, overwhelmingly indicates that the statutory equality duty has not reduced gendered inequality. Conversely, problems with implementation may have actually compounded discrimination and inequality for the most marginalised women.

Critiques of the duty cite ‘institutional resistance’ as a key impediment. Theories range from the benign, attributing this to an inherently conservative civil service resistant to innovation; to the more malign, suggestive of tolerance for the promotion of equality further down the food chain but resistant to implementation at the top.

‘Available evidence…overwhelmingly indicates that the statutory equality duty has not delivered in respect of gendered inequality.’

Budgets:

Certainly when it comes to the ‘big’ decisions, there is ample evidence of a systematic failure to subject policy to full impact assessment. For instance, the Investment strategy for Northern Ireland and the Budget have not once, in 18 years, been subject to a proper Equality Impact Assessment process. Instead, a bespoke ‘high level impact assessment’ has been crafted to cover this. The Equality Commission has emphatically rejected the use of high level impact assessment, but without enforcement powers it can do little about it. What is beyond dispute is the stark fact that no significant budget decisions have been re-profiled or adjusted as a result of identified gender impacts.

Intersectionality:

Section 75 has also been critiqued on the basis of a failure to be responsive to intersectionality of discrimination in the lives of women in general, and in particular, its failure to acknowledge the distinct interplay of gender, religious belief and political opinion which exists in NI.

Evidence of a worsening situation in terms of the intersectionality of women’s inequality can be determined from the statistics of housing need in North Belfast. The women who are most impacted by social housing inequalities are statistically more likely to be lone parents, have less disposable income and less control over family income. They constitute the ‘low paid and unofficial labour market’.

Catholics represented 73% of those on waiting lists, but only 35.7% of those awarded accommodation, whereas Protestant applicants constituted 26.2% of the waiting lists but represented 64% of those offered accommodation. The stark nature of these statistics has been significant enough to draw the attention of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

There have been suggestions that NGOs and Women’s Groups too, may be consciously avoiding combining religious and political inequalities in reports and lobbying as a tactical approach to their own survival. If groups are seen to be divisive, overtly political or departing from the narrative of ‘balance, their funding and broad based appeal could be put in jeopardy.

‘Section 75 has failed to be responsive to intersectionality of discrimination in the lives of women in general, and in particular, to acknowledge the distinct interplay of gender, religious belief and political opinion which exists in Northern Ireland.’

For those who may not be familiar with it, this map shows Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Security

Issues of security, while central to any peace agreement, are not typically dealt with in a way that takes account of the particular post-conflict threats to women’s security. The application of a gender lens to issues of women’s security in post-Good Friday Agreement Northern Ireland is very revealing.

Physical Security

Arguably, one of the most pressing risks to women’s physical security and integrity is intimate partner violence (IPV). Mc Williams and Ni Aoláin note that IPV can actually increase in the post-conflict setting and may take on particular features as a result of access to legal and illegal weaponry. This means that policy responses to intimate partner violence in post-conflict institutional arrangements must be robust and created for the specific context which they will address.

The ‘Tackling Sexual Violence and Abuse Regional Strategy‘, however, failed at the most basic level to acknowledge the transitional context it was created for, and the particularities of the problem it ostensibly seeks to address. It further failed to identify and situate government-related responses within a human rights framework of state obligations. The effect of which, according to McWilliams and Ni Aoláin was to make individuals ‘pleaders for protection’ rather than bearers of rights and status.

The Strategy’s approach to domestic violence as ‘irrespective of gender’ has led to the capture of other forms of abuse which can occur in the domestic setting. This composite approach has obscured the unequal power dynamics in intimate partner relationships, which form the kernel of the problem.

‘The “Tackling Sexual Violence and Abuse Regional Strategy”…failed at the most basic level to acknowledge the transitional context it was created for…’

Legal Security

Feminist analysis also recommends that the reform of substantive law, i.e. the law defining rights and duties, must also involve the reform of law enforcement. In conflicts which have featured an ethnic divide, scholars recommend that agreements must examine compositional issues including gender requirements.

The Good Friday Agreement established an Independent Commission on Policing. Compositional data illustrated that 8% of the RUC (the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Northern Ireland’s police force from 1922 to 2001) identified as Catholic and 13% as female. Female officers were over represented in the part-time reserve and underrepresented at senior levels. The Equal Opportunities Commission did advocate that a gender quota should be included, but this advice was disregarded. The Police Act 2000 which followed made provision for 50/50 Catholic/Protestant recruitment quotas, but committed only to a ‘gender action plan’.

The Montreal principles on women’s rights hold that economic, social and cultural rights have a particular significance for women and further acknowledge that women’s pre-disposition to socio-economic deprivation is worsened in conflict and post- conflict settings. As such, women clearly have the most to gain from the articulation of socio-economic rights within any Bill of Rights.

The creation of legally enforceable economic and social rights would go right to the core of pervasive structural inequalities, which subordinate women as ‘lesser’. Justiciable rights, i.e. rights which are subject to trail in a court of law, have the potential to be truly redistributive. The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission recommended the inclusion of legally enforceable socio-economic rights in a Bill of Rights, a position supported by over 90% of those polled by Millward Brown Ulster. The Northern Ireland Office however determined that the conferral of socio- economic rights in Northern Ireland would give rise to unjustified inequality across the UK. The current British Government’s commitment to repeal the 1998 Human Rights Act bodes ill for rights enhancement, and indeed it suggests that regression on existing civil and political rights is more likely.

Political Participation

In contrast to its myriad of provisions and technical devices aimed at ensuring representation of the different political traditions, the agreement contains no provisions which would give effect to women’s ‘full and equal participation’.

As a consequence, women have remained largely marginalised from participation in public life and in particular remain excluded from positions of power and influence in Northern Ireland.

Notwithstanding recent Assembly election results which saw the number of women elected rise from 19.4% to 28%, an increase of almost 50%, the Northern Ireland Assembly lags well behind other devolved legislatures which polled on the same day. Women comprise 48% of the incoming Welsh Assembly and 35% of the incoming Scottish Parliament. The absence of legal quotas from the framework agreement has been a defining structural inhibitor which has resulted in a ‘catch 22’ situation; unless more women are elected to the Assembly, it is unlikely to generate a more inclusive political agenda.

‘Women have remained largely marginalised from participation in public life and in particular remain excluded from positions of power and influence in Northern Ireland.’

Acknowledging then the paucity of female representation in the political institutions and public life here in general, the concept of a Civic Forum provided an unparalleled opportunity to ensure that women could impact on the decision making process. It was envisaged that representatives from a wide range of sectors, including the women’s sector, would sit alongside the NI Assembly, working as a consultative mechanism on social, economic and cultural matters.

The Civic Forum was suspended in 2002 with the devolved institutions. Unlike the other institutions provided for by the GFA, the Civic Forum was never re-activated. The recent ‘Fresh Start” Agreement makes provision for a ‘compact civic panel’ of 6 members. Appointed directly by the First and deputy First Ministers they will be tasked ‘to consider specific issues relevant to the Programme for Government’. This circumscribed ‘intermediary’ model is far removed from the model of participative governance envisaged by the GFA. Compelling evidence of exclusion of women from the decision-making process within the civil service is illustrated by the profile of the North’s most senior civil servants – the Permanent Secretaries (who head Stormont’s departments) are exclusively male.

‘Women’s demand for equal status has been largely sidelined by politicians and civil servants, who continue to prioritise central power issues.’

While power sharing and consociational arrangements undoubtedly provide stability in transitions from violent conflict, the Northern Ireland experience suggests they may also constrain deeper aspects of political transformation. Women’s demand for equal status has been largely sidelined by politicians and civil servants, who continue to prioritise central power issues. Since the Good Friday Agreement there have been a succession of further negotiations and agreements: Weston Park in 2001, St Andrews in 2006, Hillsborough Castle in 2010, Stormont House in 2015, and a Fresh Start in 2016. Each of these Agreements has been precipitated by a political crisis arising from outstanding commitments and/or allegations of default by one side or another. Issues have included the impasse over the transfer of policing and justice powers, allegations of armed group activity and problems arising within the complex power-sharing architecture. Ongoing default however in respect of key equality and human rights provisions has not, of itself, been regarded as sufficiently important to precipitate a crisis within the Stormont body politic.

On the contrary, in each successive negotiation since 1998 there has been a steadily declining focus on equality and human rights provisions. At each successive stage of the implementation process, the process itself has become more exclusive and the agenda too has narrowed considerably, largely at the expense of those measures with inherent transformative potential. Human rights elements have been consistently eroded and power issues aggrandised.

‘…Eighteen years on from 1998, the promise of ‘full and equal participation of women’ may be even more elusive now than it was then.’

The Stormont House Agreement last January – collapsed all of the outstanding Good Friday Agreement commitments in respect of Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity into one catch –all, generic paragraph. Unsurprisingly, this attrition has coincided with the absence of a specific voice for women at most of the negotiations which have followed the Good Friday Agreement. The continued absence of this specific voice suggests that eighteen years on from 1998, the promise of ‘full and equal participation of women’ may be even more elusive now than it was then.’

This is the second piece in a two-part series discussing how the women who join ISIS are often inaccurately portrayed as victims forced to join the group, with no free-will or agency of their own. Both pieces in this series are adapted from a presentation given by Amanda at Harvard University in May 2015. The first piece in this series discusses, amongst other things, ISIS’ strategies for recruiting women to the group. It can be viewed here.

This photo, of a woman receiving weapons training, was sent to Amanda by ‘Abu Jandal’

In my last post, I discussed the Islamic State group’s strategies for getting women to join its ranks. Of course, it helps to actually speak to these women. One muhajirah, who keeps her twitter account private, agreed to speak via direct message for this project as long as her screen-name was not used. She tweets press releases from the Islamic State, excerpts from Quran and Hadith which are meant to validate the agenda of the Islamic State, and commentary from IS scholars. “My life only started when I got to Sham, Alhamdoulilah…” she says in a conversation over Twitter direct message:

“What do you want me to say? We are living here under Sharia, the law of Allah SWT…No racism. Everything equal for Muslim [sic].”

She emphasizes the fact that men handle most issues related to security:

“No, we don’t fight, Alhamdoulilah. We have enough men to do that for us.”

When asked why there are so many pictures of women carrying weapons, she explains that it is:

“Just for security reasons. If they have a weapon they can use it. Their husbands, brothers, fathers learn them how to use it [sic].”

“Abu Jandal,” a pro-IS twitter user from the UK, provided some of the sources considered for this project. In January, 2015, he sent along a picture showing a woman attending weapons training in the Islamic State. She is standing with a man (her instructor), and a small child—proving my anonymous contact’s point about the availability of weapons training to women.

The second part of my anonymous contact’s statement is important for two reasons. First, it shows that, contrary to what some media accounts have claimed, women can exist outside of the home. Second, this shows that men and women are partners in the state-building project. Women are not forced to depend on men for everything. They can take care of themselves, and protect their families.

“Sisters Role in Jihad,” a jihadist manual geared towards women, has been circulating on the internet for 2-3 years now. When the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium added the manual to their archive of primary source material, they incorrectly labeled it as an “Islamic State Handbook.” According to “How to raise a jihadi-baby…” a December, 2014 article in The Daily Mail, the manual has also been used by other groups but has most recently come to be used by ISIS. It provides the example of Runa Khan—a mother from the UK who was jailed in December, 2014, after she made several pro-jihad Facebook posts, and was caught advising an undercover law enforcement agent on ways they could enter Syria. This seemingly minor distinction is important because it shows how women of the Islamic State have enough of an awareness of the world around them to take discourses from other groups and make them relevant to the Islamic State.

The manual begins with reference to Quran 9:71, and a hadith about how to correct “a violation of Allah’s command. Taken together, these passages demonstrate that men and women are equal partners in jihad. The manual continues, drawing no distinction when it notes that the best way for both men and women to respond when they observe a “violation” is jihad fi sabeelilah, or “fighting in the path of Allah.” It normalises jihad by likening it to a woman’s daily prayers and the act of fasting during Ramadan, and notes that in the same way a woman does not need a man’s permission to pray or fast, she does not need a man’s permission to go off on jihad.

The manual goes on to list three ways that women can take part in battlefield operations. First, it encourages women to take part in the actual fighting. This section begins with an appeal to history—asking women to remember the great female fighters in Islamic history who came before them. The manual does draw a distinction, noting that the battlefield is primarily a male domain, but there are exceptions. “It should be noted that physical fighting has been a role assigned primarily to men…” it says, “However, when the need arose, our brave sisters never held back from fighting, and neither should they now!”

The section concludes with the following “note for sisters wanting to participate in fighting these days”:

“By the Grace of Allah, The Most High, the situation in the Ummah is not that desperate yet, that sisters are called to fight. Those sisters who voluntarily want to join the fighting for reward from Allah, are advised to not go unless the leader of Jihad in that place calls sisters to fight. As for other help, they can go if the Mujahideen are able to accommodate and protect them. However, sisters should definitely be prepared!“

This section is important for three reasons. First, it shows that women are capable of evaluating the rapidly evolving political landscape, and making the decision to take to the battlefield on their own. Second, by stressing the importance of making sure that the mujahideen can protect women, it shows just how important women are to the Islamic State. Third, by saying that “sisters should definitely be prepared,” the manual acknowledges a woman’s agency and her ability to prepare for battle on her own.

In the next section, the manual mentions ways that women can support fighters in the battlefield. They can provide medical support, food, water, weapons, and encouragement to the mujahideen. The section again appeals to history. It mentions the Quranic example of Safiyyah bint Abdul Muttalib who carried a spear into battle and remained at the back of the army as they marched on. She was prepared to strike the enemy, but actually kept that position so she could “strike those Muslims who dared to escape from the battle.” It then provides a present day example of a woman from the UK who carried weapons and ammunition over mountains for the Bosnian Muslims “…as she knew the enemy would not suspect her.” The third and final part of the section on battlefield operations mentions that women can take part in guard duty, and take on other responsibilities related to protecting the community.

The second part of the manual details the many ways women can participate in jihad away from the battlefield. Her roles here are much more nuanced than people admit. Women don’t just procreate. They are also expected to provide children with a balanced education–providing both physical training and academic lessons. Women are expected to become familiar with the training routine first, both so they can participate themselves, and so they better can train their children. Once again, women are not just acting to better the state.

This photo was sent to Amanda by an anonymous source

This section of the manual also shows how influential women are when it instructs women to encourage their loved ones to wage jihad. The section mentions four additional ways for women to contribute, but due to space limitations, I will only mention the second way—that is jihad “on an academic level.” As part of this charge, women are told to study the works of famous scholars so they can provide counters to people’s objections to jihad. This also makes it possible for them to train other women and, in some cases, men. Lastly, this makes it so women themselves can become passionate about the cause and then motivate others.

In February, 2015, the Al Khansa Brigades published “Women in the Islamic State”—a manual by women, for women. It mentions in the introduction that it is not an official state document, but it is still a useful source to consider given the role that the Al Khansa Brigades play in the day to day affairs of the Islamic State. According to an interview carried out by Syria Deeply with Abu Ahmad, an ISIS official in Raqqa, the Al Khansa Brigades are an all-female police force that works “…to raise awareness of our religion among women, and to punish women who do not abide by the law.”

In the introduction, the authors say that the Islamic State is simply picking up where the Ottoman Caliphate left off. “The era of Western dominance and its influence on our lifestyle and way of living has passed, whether it is regarding its social, educational, economic…or medical and industrial aspects,” the manual says. The Islamic State sees itself as bringing people back to the faith, and liberating people from the forces of western imperialism.

They also argue that what they suggest for women is nothing new:

“Foremost among the first people that we refer to are Muslim women, members of their Islamic community.”

The manual says:

In that day, they had a role. Today, too, they have a role, one which is derived from the principles of Islamic law and its teachings.”

The piece continues, noting that a woman’s role has been “tampered with.”

Moving on, the women of Al Khansa criticize both men and women for their shallow vanity. “Man adorned and decorated this world, trying to make it look like Paradise because he does not believe in the true Paradise…”, it says. The women then go on to explain their true purpose—namely, implementing Sharia and spreading Islam. They do clarify, however, noting that secular sciences do still have a place in the Islamic State, as long as they’re put to use to serve God’s cause.

The piece then provides a manifesto. Women are instructed to follow the examples of Assiya, Mariam, Khadija, Fatima and Aisha—some of the great women of Islam. After that part, the authors make an interesting argument:

“The problem today is that women are not fulfilling their fundamental roles, the role that is consistent with their deepest nature, for an important reason: that women are not presented with a true picture of man.”

In other words, it is the shortcomings of men which lead women to take action to meet the needs of the community.

The marriage dynamic at work in the Islamic State is also much more balanced than the media makes it seem. “Hence, while Islam gives man dominance, it bestows upon women the honour of implementation (executive),” the piece says. Men and women work together to build a home and a family, and the contributions of both are necessary in order for the family unit to thrive. Women of the Islamic State are not expected to assume this leadership role without any training. The manual goes on to note that education for women is favoured by the Islamic State, as “She cannot fulfil this role if she is illiterate and ignorant.”

The manual has sections on aesthetics, offers critiques of western models of femininity, and provides a few case studies. I will only discuss two more sections here—“secondary functions for women” and “suggestions of a curriculum for Muslim women.”

The section, “secondary functions for women” makes the argument that a woman’s most important function is that of wife and mother, but notes that she does so much more. Women are able to go off on jihad if the enemy is attacking and the imams issue a call for it. Women are encouraged to study religion. Women are permitted to become doctors and teachers, as long as they adhere to Shariah guidelines.

A discussion of the section, “suggestions of a curriculum for Muslim women” also feels like an appropriate way to wrap this up. It shows that women receive instruction in a wide array of subjects from an early age—ensuring that she is well read and able to fend for herself in the material, spiritual, and academic realms. Starting from the age of seven, she receives instruction in fiqh, religion, Arabic, the natural sciences, textiles and knitting, and basic cooking. Particularly important to note is the fact that she receives instruction on her legal rights in the context of marriage. In other words, she is always able to assert herself.

This is the first piece in a two-part series discussing how the women who join ISIS are often inaccurately portrayed as victims forced to join the group, with no free-will or agency of their own. Both pieces in this series are adapted from a presentation given by Amanda at Harvard University in May 2015. The second piece in this two-part series, featuring excerpts from Amanda’s correspondence with a female member of ISIS, and a discussion of a jihadi manual aimed at women, can be read here.

Many journalists and academics have made the argument that women join the Islamic State group looking for adventure, power and a sense of purpose, but are disappointed with what they find after joining. These writers and thinkers miss opportunities to discuss displays of female agency. Yes, one finds abuses of power, but one can find those anywhere. Women of the Islamic State do not all blindly follow the Islamic State agenda. They help to shape it in their own way.

Women are the ultimate ‘keyboard warriors’ in the Islamic State. They regularly post guidance, and words of wisdom to a wide variety of social media platforms. For example, a woman who writes under the name ‘Umm Layth’ uses tumblr. I will focus on three parts of a four part series she wrote called ‘Diary of a Muhajirah‘. The second part of the series focuses on how a woman should deal with her family when she makes the decision to move to the Islamic State. She writes:

‘Wallahi preparing yourself to leave is difficult because you are leaving the women who kept you in her womb for 9 months, who breastfed you, who stayed up till night taking care of each and every one of your needs and the person who you truly feel at home with’.

She draws a noteworthy distinction here. It is a woman’s ties to her mother, not her father, which make it hard for her to leave. A woman is not as wed to patriarchy as the dominant media discourses make us believe.

Umm Layth notes that parents will most likely not understand a woman’s decision to join the Islamic State. Instead of judging them, or responding with hostility, she suggests that women keep their parents in their prayers. ‘You have to answer to Allah (swt),’ she reminds women, ‘so always fear Him and give your family and parents their right.’ She concludes the entry with a note where she attempts to dispel the myth of Jihad-al-nikaah or ‘sexual jihad.’ ‘Sisters a little note: many people in present day do not understand and cannot comprehend at all why a female would choose to make this decision,’ she says. ‘They will point fingers and say behind your back and to your families faces that you are taking part in “Jihadul nikaah” or “sexual jihad” and many many more vile terms.’ This point is important for several reasons. First, by classifying ‘sexual jihad’ as a ‘vile’ term, she is actively attempting to dispel myths about her gender. Second, it shows a woman taking control of jihadist discourses and attempting to define her personal jihad on her own terms.

The third part of Umm Layth’s series is a little less focused. She says:

‘First of all wallahi wallahi I know my position. I am not a scholar… or even a student of knowledge…So please do not assume that of me’.

First, she tries to define ‘normal.’ She establishes herself as a common, everyday woman but all of her entries demonstrate a knowledge of theology and law—showing that it is possible for all women to learn their rights, exercise their rights, and actively engage with the dominant discourses of the Islamic State. She goes on to mention that she hopes her words will encourage both men AND women—proving that the gender divide in the Islamic State isn’t as sharp as the media would often lead us to believe. She continues, noting that, contrary to what the media has said many a time, these women aren’t uneducated. Many of the women who move to the Islamic State were studying at university before making the move. She also reminds the reader that these women come from good families. They’re not the troubled girls who were seeking personal meaning or adventure as the media likes to make them seem.

Her next argument is interesting in that it challenges the orientalist discourses on possession and worth. Yes, these women have ‘left their luxuries behind,’ as she says, but they do receive ghanimah (an Arabic term, typically used to refer to spoils of war). This can include anything from animals to household appliances. Yes, these women don’t define wealth and worth by a more materialistic, western standard, but that doesn’t mean that they are poor.

Another entry in the series reads like a brief instructional manual. In it, she helps to prepare women for their husbands’ martyrdom. She provides a checklist for women to help them make sure that all of their needs will be met, and suggests a website for ‘further reading’. She concludes with a message to men where she stresses the importance of making sure that their wives are prepared for their inevitable death, writing:

‘You are responsible for your wife. You make sure to give all her rights to her and under this comes one of the most important duties of yours brother, and this is to educate your wife!’

This entry is important for three reasons. First, it proves that women don’t just rely on men to tell them everything they need to know to thrive in the world around them. Women are much more active in shaping their own destinies. Secondly, women do not lose their ability to function after their husbands have passed on. Third, it shows another example of a woman holding a man accountable, by reminding him of his responsibilities to his wife.

The dark-grey area shows the territory controlled by ISIS as of 01 May 2016. By BlueHypercane761.

Umm Ubaydah is another Islamic State ‘keyboard warrior’ who uses tumblr to reach her audience. Her blog is more academic. She posts a lot of quotes and essays from famous Islamic thinkers. In one post, she provides advice to a woman on how to assemble a library on Islamic subjects:

This brief post is important for two reasons. First, it shows women providing guidance to other women. Their knowledge of their faith is not put through a patriarchal filter. Second, it shows a woman processing the Islamic State agenda and assembling her own list of supplemental readings which answer any questions she might have in a way that makes sense to her.

In another post, Umm Ubaydah re-posts Sheikh Abdullah Azzam’s essay, ‘Regarding Whether the Parents’ Permission is Sought Once Jihad Becomes Fard Ayn.’ One key point that the essay emphasizes is the fact that:

‘The situation of the permission from parents and husband not being required is sustained until the enemy is expelled from the Muslim land, or when there is the accumulation of sufficient numbers to expel the enemy even if all the Muslims in the earth are assembled.’

By re-posting this treatise on the permissibility of jihad, she shows that women understand what are said to be more masculine discourses on war. She also shows that she is very much aware of her rights outside the home. Women do not just live in the shadows of their husbands and parents. Furthermore, by re-posting this essay, Umm Ubaydah reminds women that jihad becomes a gender blind obligation in times of war.

Dabiq Magazine, an Islamic State publication, also addresses what I like to call ‘The Woman Question.’ The seventh issue features ‘An Interview with Umm Basir Al-Muhajirah.’ In the west, she is known as Hayat Boumeddiene—the wife of Ahmedy Coulibaly, the man who swore allegiance to ISIS and took 12 hostages in a Paris supermarket in January, 2015. The fact that she is speaking on her own here shows that her worth to the Islamic State did not decrease after her husband’s martyrdom. She begins by harshly judging both men and women, and asking both to become more active participants in their religion. ‘Why do you degrade yourselves by thinking you cannot understand the Qur’ān and Sunnah and believing you are in need of the understanding of this imam or that scholar?’ she asks, ‘It is true, we need the people of knowledge in general, but, Alhamdulillāh, Allah facilitated the understanding of the Qur’ān and Sunnah’. This all goes to show, once again, that both men and women are equally capable of thinking for themselves. Nowhere does one find men or women being force-fed a stern, legalistic interpretation of Islam.

The covers of issues 1 and 2 of Dabiq magazine

Boumeddiene continues, saying, ‘I saw from amongst you generous people with enthusiasm. Do not lose these traits by following certain individuals. Sincerely ask Allah to guide you. Strive against your inner selves so that you might succeed.’ This shows that women have enough of a knowledge of their faith and the Islamic State agenda to advise others—both male and female. Women are not simply acted upon. Second, her admonition to ‘Strive against your inner selves’ is important because it shows that there is no mob-think mentality at work. Jihad in the Islamic State is a very personal decision. Moving on, she tells the reader that, ‘It is essential for you to love Allah and His Messenger more than your own selves, your husbands, your children, and your parents.’ This last part dispels the myth that women are only able to find personal meaning in the home. They do not just define themselves in terms of their relationship to patriarchy. The piece concludes with an appeal to women to remember the great women of Islamic history, and to follow their example.

A pro-IS Twitter user who goes by the name of ‘A.Ibrahim’ suggested much of the material considered for this project. On March 26th, 2015, he sent along a video on Diwan al-Madhalim (The Board of Grievance). Ibrahim emphasizes the fact that men and women are both given a chance to have their concerns heard by the court. When I asked if there are any differences in the ways men and women are treated, he responded by saying ‘Not much difference. I know a muhajirah (a female scholar from Saudi Arabia) who’s working in a court in Raqqa. There’s a ladies’ section in every IS institute.’ He went on to note that the structure and function of the court is really nothing new. ‘The first Diwan al-Madhalim…was established by the caliph Umar bin Al-Khattab, 1400 years ago,’ he says, showing that the Islamic State isn’t trying to advance a new understanding of Islam. Everything about it is steeped in tradition—including its treatment of women.

In an exchange back in April, 2015, ‘A. Ibrahim’ spoke of the work done by the IS Health Ministry. He stressed the fact that the ministry has actively worked to employ female doctors to tend to the needs of female patients in order to prevent any mixing between men and women. Around that same time, the Islamic State opened a medical school in Raqqa where both men and women are free to study. The only caveat is that men and women must remain separated at all times. Other than that, both genders are given the same chance to pursue their studies. Separate does not necessarily mean unequal.

Also in mid-May, 2015, there was some confusion after an Islamic State wedding certificate surfaced on Twitter. The Independent then published an article entitled, ‘ISIS wedding certificate shows jihadi bride demanding right to be a suicide bomber as condition of getting married.’ Ibrahim clarified the bride’s position in a conversation with another twitter user, and sent me a link to the exchange. Ultimately, he says that the bride’s true position got lost in a series of translation errors. ‘The option is signed by the wife that the husband does not prevent her…’ he said. In other words, she can make the choice to carry out a martyrdom operation, but doesn’t necessarily have to do so. This is an important distinction because it shows that women can take part in battlefield operations if they feel so inclined, but they can also prove their worth in other ways.